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The American Prospect - articles by authorenHow Donald Trump Is Turning the GOP into a Postmodernist Partyhttp://prospect.org/article/how-donald-trump-turning-gop-postmodernist-party
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<p>President-elect Donald Trump arrives to speak at a event, Thursday, December 1, 2016, in Cincinnati. </p>
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<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-d7e60345-cc1e-57c8-7c0f-7146c3786f05"><span class="dropcap">W</span>e've endured presidents who told big lies before. Ronald Reagan said he didn't trade arms for hostages. Bill Clinton said he didn't have sexual relations with that woman. George W. Bush said Iraq had huge stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. Sometimes those lies were disproved quickly, sometimes it took a while, but in every case the president and those around him not only worked to convince us that the lie was true, they never questioned the presumption that it was not a good thing for the president of the United States to lie to the public. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-d7e60345-cc1e-57c8-7c0f-7146c3786f05">Well that's just one more norm that Donald Trump is going to tear down.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-d7e60345-cc1e-57c8-7c0f-7146c3786f05">While Trump told </span><a href="https://www.thestar.com/news/world/uselection/2016/11/04/donald-trump-the-unauthorized-database-of-false-things.html">hundreds and hundreds</a> of lies over the course of the campaign, the most striking thing about them wasn't the sheer volume, it was the unapologetic way he told them, without even the barest attempt to be honest. He didn't care how quickly or how often he was corrected, and in many cases he went on telling a lie long after it had been debunked. For his supporters, this willingness to say anything was the heart of his appeal—he "tells it like it is," they said over and over, which actually meant not that he accurately described something real about the world, but that he said whatever he wanted. When the snooty know-it-all fact checkers explained his deceptions, that only made them more sure he was on to something.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-d7e60345-cc1e-57c8-7c0f-7146c3786f05">And of course, they were marinating in their own stew of tales from an alternate universe. Not only would they accept anything Trump told them, they seemed to delight in believing the most lunatic conspiracy theories they could find. As Michael Grunwald </span><a href="http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/12/republican-party-obstructionism-victory-trump-214498">reported</a>, "At an event in Pensacola, a member of Bikers 4 Trump told me Obama had made it illegal for anyone who isn't an immigrant or a minority to open a Dunkin' Donuts."</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-d7e60345-cc1e-57c8-7c0f-7146c3786f05">Granted, as far as I know Trump has not publicly delved into the details of the federal government's egregiously invasive actions on donut franchise ownership. But if you work for Trump and actually have to defend his more outlandish statements, what do you do? One way to handle it is to say that his lies are actually true. But another way is to undermine the very idea of truth, to claim that reality is unknowable, there's no such thing as fact, and when Donald Trump says something, it transmutes into a kind of truth as it passes out his mouth, whether the material universe might tell you otherwise or not. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-d7e60345-cc1e-57c8-7c0f-7146c3786f05">Last week, at a post-election forum at Harvard that got attention mostly for the nasty squabbles between Trump and Clinton aides, former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski </span><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/12/02/corey-lewandowskis-very-odd-explanation-of-donald-trumps-facts/?utm_term=.5e783c5b6281">said</a> this:</p>
<blockquote><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-d7e60345-cc1e-57c8-7c0f-7146c3786f05">This is the problem with the media. You guys took everything that Donald Trump said so literally. The American people didn't. They understood it. They understood that sometimes, when you have a conversation with people, whether it's around the dinner table or at a bar, you're going to say things, and sometimes you don't have all the facts to back it up.</span></p>
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<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-d7e60345-cc1e-57c8-7c0f-7146c3786f05">In its way, this is quite refreshing. Lewandowski isn't saying that Trump is an honest man, just that lying is no big deal in a president, because hey, everybody does it, right? And the truly sophisticated voter understands not to expect anything different.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-d7e60345-cc1e-57c8-7c0f-7146c3786f05">Other of Trump's people have taken a slightly different tack. Sometimes it's easier to focus in on one lie than to deal with a whole mountain of them, so some in the media have begun pressing Trump's aides on his tweeted </span><a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/802972944532209664">claim</a> that "In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally." Trump apparently got this idea from Alex Jones, the conspiracy-mongering radio host who believes that the children at Sandy Hook were actors and 9/11 was an inside job—and who is a great favorite of the president-elect's. Here's how Mike Pence defended the statement on ABC's <em><a href="http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/week-transcript-vice-president-elect-mike-pence-gen/story?id=43952176">This Week</a></em>:</p>
<blockquote><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-d7e60345-cc1e-57c8-7c0f-7146c3786f05">STEPHANPOULOS: But can you provide any evidence—can you provide any evidence to back up that statement?</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-d7e60345-cc1e-57c8-7c0f-7146c3786f05">PENCE; Well, look, I think he's expressed his opinion on that. And he's entitled to express his opinion on that. And I think the American people — I think the American people find it very refreshing that they have a president who will tell them what's on his mind. And I think the connection that he made in the course...</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-d7e60345-cc1e-57c8-7c0f-7146c3786f05">STEPHANOPOULOS: Whether it's true or not?</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-d7e60345-cc1e-57c8-7c0f-7146c3786f05">PENCE: Well, they're going to tell them—he's going to say what he believes to be true and I know that he's always going to speak in that way as president.</span></p>
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<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-d7e60345-cc1e-57c8-7c0f-7146c3786f05">Or look at how Reince Priebus answered a similar question on <a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/news/face-the-nation-transcript-december-4-2016-priebus-gingrich-pelosi-panetta/"><em>Face the Nation</em></a>:</span></p>
<blockquote><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-d7e60345-cc1e-57c8-7c0f-7146c3786f05">DICKERSON: But you think millions of people voted illegally?</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-d7e60345-cc1e-57c8-7c0f-7146c3786f05">PRIEBUS: It's possible.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-d7e60345-cc1e-57c8-7c0f-7146c3786f05">DICKERSON: There is no evidence that it happened in millions of votes in California. I guess the question is, when you're president, can you just offer a theory that has no evidence behind it, or does he have to tighten up his standard of proof?</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-d7e60345-cc1e-57c8-7c0f-7146c3786f05">PRIEBUS: I think he's done a great job. I think the president-elect is someone who has pushed the envelope and caused people to think in this country, has not taken conventional thought on every single issue.</span></p>
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<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-d7e60345-cc1e-57c8-7c0f-7146c3786f05">So according to his closest advisors, Donald Trump can make up anything he wants, because "he's going to say what he believes to be true" and he "has pushed the envelope and caused people to think." </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-d7e60345-cc1e-57c8-7c0f-7146c3786f05"><span class="pullquote-right">This kind of thing makes rational people want to tear their hair out.</span> You may have seen </span><a href="http://www.cnn.com/2016/12/01/politics/donald-trump-supporters-check-in-camerota-new-day-cnntv/">this video</a> of CNN host Alisyn Camerota literally smacking herself in the head in frustration as she talks to Trump supporters who insist that President Obama publicly encouraged undocumented people to vote, and the state of California allows them to do so by the millions. No matter what she tells them, they will not be dissuaded. Mr. Trump said it, so it's true.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-d7e60345-cc1e-57c8-7c0f-7146c3786f05">The eagerness of his supporters to believe whatever ridiculous thing he tells them helps assure Trump that he can get away with anything. And what's truly depressing is that he probably can. Not that he won't be criticized for his endless lies, because he will. But as his aides and allies continue to insist that there's no such thing as truth and nothing wrong with lying when Trump does it, more and more Republicans will adopt those views, until they become utterly mainstream. </span></p>
<p><span id="docs-internal-guid-d7e60345-cc1e-57c8-7c0f-7146c3786f05">So it is that conservatives are on their way to becoming the ultimate postmodernists, convinced that there's no such thing as objective truth and each one of us exists in our own subjective reality. Donald Trump hasn't even become president yet, and he's already refashioning them in his image.</span></p>
</div></div></div>Mon, 05 Dec 2016 10:00:00 +0000226426 at http://prospect.orgPaul WaldmanWhy the Trump Era Could Be an Opportunity for Democratshttp://prospect.org/article/why-trump-era-could-be-opportunity-democrats
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<p>President-elect Donald Trump is seen in the lobby of <em>The New York Times</em>' offices on Eighth Avenue in midtown Manhattan in New York City on November 22, 2016</p>
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<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-d7e60345-a7f7-287c-32af-a0d8de33adc7"><span class="dropcap">T</span>he late Israeli diplomat Abba Eban famously said of the Palestinians that they never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. And today, Democrats and liberals have the opportunity to show that they won't miss this opportunity.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-d7e60345-a7f7-287c-32af-a0d8de33adc7">I say that not to discount or minimize the horrors that the next four years will bring. The repeal of the Affordable Care Act, the cancellation of climate regulations, the war on unions, the evisceration of the safety net, mass deportations, potentially the repeal of </span><em>Roe v. Wade</em>—it's all on the table. And that's before we even get to the kind of catastrophes that could be produced by Donald Trump's unique combination of ignorance, impulsiveness, and vindictiveness.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-d7e60345-a7f7-287c-32af-a0d8de33adc7">The cost will be enormous, and in some cases it may take decades to undo the damage. But the left can use the next four years as a time of rebuilding and reinvigoration—if they're smart about it.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-d7e60345-a7f7-287c-32af-a0d8de33adc7">Ironic though it may seem, being out of power—or at least being out of the White House—can be very good for a party. Just look at how far the GOP has come in the last eight years. When Barack Obama took office in January 2009, Democrats controlled both houses of Congress. Twenty-eight of the 50 governors were Democrats. They controlled both houses in 27 state legislatures, while Republicans had full control in only 14. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-d7e60345-a7f7-287c-32af-a0d8de33adc7">The turnaround since then has been absolutely stunning. When Donald Trump takes the oath of office, Republicans will have the White House and both houses of Congress, 33 governorships, and full control of 32 state legislatures, compared to the Democrats'. That shift happened despite the fact that their party is deeply unpopular; these days only a third of the public has a </span><a href="http://elections.huffingtonpost.com/pollster/republican-party-favorable-rating">favorable view</a> of the GOP, while the Democratic Party <a href="http://elections.huffingtonpost.com/pollster/democratic-party-favorable-rating">rates</a> about twelve points higher.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-d7e60345-a7f7-287c-32af-a0d8de33adc7">There are multiple reasons for the change that took place during the Obama years, but the most important one is the most basic and structural: The president's party almost always loses ground in down-ballot races. Voters take out their displeasure with the president or with Washington on his party's candidates at the state and local level, as irrational as it might be. Unencumbered by governing, the opposition party doesn't have to make difficult choices and can just blame the president for everything that's less than perfect, often to great effect.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-d7e60345-a7f7-287c-32af-a0d8de33adc7">But that doesn't mean Democrats can just sit around and wait for the tide to turn, because the decisions they make now mean the difference between reversing only some of their losses and reasserting the kind of control they used to have.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-d7e60345-a7f7-287c-32af-a0d8de33adc7">So what should they do? <span class="pullquote-right">The agenda is long, but the most pressing priority may be fixing the voting problem. </span>Republicans have done a spectacular job making it as cumbersome as possible for people—particularly the kind of people who vote for Democrats—to actually register and vote. Their assault has been a comprehensive one, involving legislatures, the courts, and administrative policies down to the local level. The Democratic pushback has to be equally encompassing, including not just legal challenges to voter suppression but the creation of a permanent mobilization system that registers voters and prepares the ground for get-out-the-vote efforts when the next election comes. It may be grossly unfair, but as long as Republican-appointed courts validate Republican-passed voter suppression measures, Democrats have to do twice as good a job of registering and turning out voters.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-d7e60345-a7f7-287c-32af-a0d8de33adc7">So it isn't enough to ramp up a few months before the next election; that ground effort should start now and be ongoing. Memo to any liberal billionaires out there: This would be a great place to put your money, and not into some super PAC that's going to make a bunch of lovely TV ads that don't change any minds. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-d7e60345-a7f7-287c-32af-a0d8de33adc7">That next election will be a critical one. Chances are good that in 2018 there will be a great deal of discontentment about the Trump presidency; as we learned in 2014, 2010, and 2006, off-year elections can have seismic effects. But in midterm elections the deck is already stacked against Democrats, since many of their voters, particularly young people and minorities, are less likely to turn out than the older white people who make up the Republican base. That makes it even more more important for Democrats to start preparing now.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-d7e60345-a7f7-287c-32af-a0d8de33adc7">One excellent way to do that—and an area where Democrats can make progress even in states where Republicans control the levers of power—is with initiative campaigns that can make progressive policy change and mobilize voters. It got lost in the news of the presidential election, but this year progressives did </span><a href="https://ballotpedia.org/2016_ballot_measures">extremely well</a> with ballot initiatives. They increased the minimum wage in four states, and overturned one law that had created a sub-minimum wage for young people. They passed laws loosening regulations on marijuana in eight of the nine states where the issue was on the ballot. And they saw gun safety measures pass in three of the four states where they were offered.</p>
<p><span id="docs-internal-guid-d7e60345-a7f7-287c-32af-a0d8de33adc7">There's no question that these are going to be dark days for liberals, and the steady stream of outrages from the Trump administration and the Republican Congress will tempt some to become despondent. But outrage is also a powerful motivator. Let's not forget that the last Republican presidency saw an explosion of grassroots energy, driven by opposition to the Iraq War and organized through the new and exciting liberal blogosphere. If progressives think creatively, plan early, put their resources in the right places, and work hard, they could have a similar rebirth. But it won't happen by itself.</span></p>
</div></div></div>Mon, 28 Nov 2016 10:00:00 +0000226372 at http://prospect.orgPaul WaldmanThe Greatest Grift of Allhttp://prospect.org/article/greatest-grift-all
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<p>Donald Trump gestures a thumbs up at the clubhouse of Trump International Golf Club, in Bedminster Township, New Jersey, November 20, 2016. </p>
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<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-d7e60345-8412-a063-0bd1-7aa89cd6f1ac"><span class="dropcap">A</span>s he stands in his gold-plated apartment in Trump Tower gazing out over Manhattan, Donald Trump has no doubt marveled at how in becoming president he has finally achieved the power and influence he so richly deserves. He always knew he was smarter than everyone else and more of a winner than all those nobodies who would carp and criticize, when they don't even have their own planes or are so weak they're still married to their first wives. He showed them all.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-d7e60345-8412-a063-0bd1-7aa89cd6f1ac">And now, it's time to really cash in. He's got the greatest business opportunity he's ever had, and he's not going to let it pass him by.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-d7e60345-8412-a063-0bd1-7aa89cd6f1ac">Surely you weren't naïve enough to believe him when Trump said his network of businesses and partnerships didn't pose any conflict-of-interest problems, because his grown children will run the business while he's president and he'll be completely focused on making America great. That was just something to tell the rubes, no more true than the promises a Trump University instructor would make to a mark as he browbeat them into maxing out their credit cards to move up to the Gold Elite seminar where the real investment secrets would be revealed.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-d7e60345-8412-a063-0bd1-7aa89cd6f1ac">Here's what has happened just in the last week or so:</span></p>
<ul dir="ltr"><li><span id="docs-internal-guid-d7e60345-8412-a063-0bd1-7aa89cd6f1ac">Trump's Washington, D.C., hotel encouraged foreign diplomats to stay there when in the American capital, an invitation many thought it would be foolish to turn down. "Why wouldn't I stay at his hotel blocks from the White House, so I can tell the new president, 'I love your new hotel!' Isn't it rude to come to his city and say, 'I am staying at your competitor?'" one Asian diplomat </span><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/capitalbusiness/2016/11/18/9da9c572-ad18-11e6-977a-1030f822fc35_story.html">told</a> <em>The Washington Post</em>. That would indeed be a rudeness Trump would take notice of.</li>
<li><span id="docs-internal-guid-d7e60345-8412-a063-0bd1-7aa89cd6f1ac">Trump held a </span><a href="http://www.politico.com/blogs/donald-trump-administration/2016/11/ivanka-trump-shinzo-abe-meeting-231593">meeting</a> with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, in which Ivanka Trump sat in. Like her brothers Don and Eric, Ivanka, who will be running the Trump Corporation, also sits on the transition's executive committee.</li>
<li><span id="docs-internal-guid-d7e60345-8412-a063-0bd1-7aa89cd6f1ac">In a clever bit of branding synergy, Ivanka's company </span><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/15/fashion/ivanka-trump-bracelet-60-minutes-conflict-of-interest.html">hawked</a> the bracelet she wore during a <em>60 Minutes</em> interview with her father.</li>
<li><span id="docs-internal-guid-d7e60345-8412-a063-0bd1-7aa89cd6f1ac">Trump </span><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/20/us/politics/donald-trump-pauses-transition-work-to-meet-with-indian-business-partners.html">took time out</a> from his transition duties to meet with three Indian developers who are building a Trump-branded apartment complex near Mumbai.</li>
</ul><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-d7e60345-8412-a063-0bd1-7aa89cd6f1ac">That's not to mention that it's looking like Trump's closest adviser will be his son-in-law Jared Kushner, a young man with so little understanding of government that when he met with administration officials to talk about the transition he was </span><a href="http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-trump-transition-20161111-story.html">surprised</a> to learn that the Obama staff will not in fact be staying on to serve President Trump. Every night Kushner will return home to Ivanka, and if you think he won't share information with her that could be advantageous to the Trump business, I've got a real estate seminar to sell you.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-d7e60345-8412-a063-0bd1-7aa89cd6f1ac">And there's the Trump University fraud case, which Trump </span><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/source-trump-nearing-settlement-in-trump-university-fraud-cases/2016/11/18/8dc047c0-ada0-11e6-a31b-4b6397e625d0_story.html">settled</a> by agreeing to pay the victims of his con $25 million. As David Frum <a href="https://twitter.com/davidfrum/status/800328470819721216">said</a> on Twitter, "Why did Trump settle the Trump U case? Because the time for puny million dollar scams has ended. The time for billion dollar scams has come." For some reason the fact that the president-elect just settled a fraud case for $25 million was less interesting to the news media than the fact that cast members of <em>Hamilton</em> implored Mike Pence not to oppress non-white Americans.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-d7e60345-8412-a063-0bd1-7aa89cd6f1ac">In doing all this now, before he even takes office, Trump is sending a very clear message to the world: If you want my attention and my favor, you'd better pony up. As former Federal Election Commission chair Trevor Potter </span><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/11/18/how-president-trump-could-use-the-white-house-to-enrich-himself-and-his-family/">wrote</a>, having Trump's children run his company "will produce conflicts of interest of an unprecedented magnitude and create the appearance that he and his family are using his office to enrich themselves, even if they don't take advantage of the many opportunities to do so."</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-d7e60345-8412-a063-0bd1-7aa89cd6f1ac">But let's be honest: The idea that the Trump kids wouldn't take advantage of the opportunities to enrich the family through a Trump presidency is downright laughable. Of course they will, and every dollar they scoop up will add to the president's personal fortune.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-d7e60345-8412-a063-0bd1-7aa89cd6f1ac">Consider what happens when Ivanka, Donny, and Eric take an exploratory business trip to some foreign country. They'll be greeted by the top political leadership, who will know that the president of the United States will quickly learn of the results of their visit. So the prime minister of this country might consider that instructing his diplomats to stay in Trump's hotel isn't quite enough of a gesture. It would be better for him to find a project being planned in his capital city and strongly encourage the developer to strike a licensing deal with the Trumps—one with extremely favorable terms.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-d7e60345-8412-a063-0bd1-7aa89cd6f1ac"><span class="pullquote-right">This may sound like a modern version of the way medieval kings would expect all the landowners to come to the castle bearing trunks of gold to pay proper respect, lest they incur his wrath.</span> And you may be wondering: Does Trump really think he can get away with this? </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-d7e60345-8412-a063-0bd1-7aa89cd6f1ac">Yes he does.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-d7e60345-8412-a063-0bd1-7aa89cd6f1ac">Consider it from his perspective. Throughout the campaign he did things no candidate was supposed to do, in his campaign strategy and organization (not really having much of either) and in his behavior, whether it was insulting his opponents like a schoolyard bully, encouraging violence among his feral crowds, getting into fights with sympathetic citizens, or telling a Himalayan-sized mountain of lies. Despite all that, despite all the times supposedly wise observers said he was finished, he won. He proved them all wrong.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-d7e60345-8412-a063-0bd1-7aa89cd6f1ac">Sure, no American president has seen the White House as a vehicle for personal enrichment before. But that's just because they didn't have Donald Trump's creative vision. When Democrats and people in the media criticize him for it, he'll just mock them and act as if nothing's wrong. And if you think Republicans are going to do anything about it, you weren't paying much attention during the campaign. </span></p>
<p><span id="docs-internal-guid-d7e60345-8412-a063-0bd1-7aa89cd6f1ac">So if people are saying it's unprecedented and inappropriate and vulgar for him to be using the White House to enrich himself, is Donald Trump going to care? Why should he? He got away with everything else, didn't he?</span></p>
</div></div></div>Mon, 21 Nov 2016 10:00:00 +0000226345 at http://prospect.orgPaul WaldmanThe Unpersuadableshttp://prospect.org/article/unpersuadables
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<p>Supporters of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump wait in line prior to a campaign rally in Tyngsborough, Mass., Friday, October 16, 2015. </p>
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<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-e1e4d364-5ff8-15a7-c02f-e914a5a27125"><span class="dropcap">A</span>s we conduct our national autopsy on the 2016 presidential campaign, one of the most common arguments in circulation is that Hillary Clinton failed to do enough to persuade people in places where Donald Trump ended up showing unusual strength, particularly the Rust Belt. And indeed, she lost a group of states—Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin—that had gone for the Democratic candidate in election after election. She might have spent more time there, or spoken more to the issues that concern those voters, particularly the longstanding economic problems in that region. Had she done that, the story goes, she would have maintained that "blue wall" and she'd be president today.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-e1e4d364-5ff8-15a7-c02f-e914a5a27125">Now there's plenty you can criticize about Clinton as a candidate and her campaign, including where she devoted resources in the closing days of the race. But the idea of the unpersuaded Midwestern white working-class voters rests on a very shaky premise: that they could have been persuaded, no matter what Clinton tried to tell them.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-e1e4d364-5ff8-15a7-c02f-e914a5a27125">Before we go any further, we should acknowledge two important facts. The first is that a shift of a little more than 100,000 votes—or less than one in 1,000 of those cast—spread across Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin would have made Hillary Clinton president, and instead of talking about what a catastrophe her campaign was we'd be praising her for her strategic brilliance. The second is that, in case you've forgotten, </span><em>Clinton got more votes</em>. The only reason she isn't president-elect is the bizarre and anti-democratic Electoral College. You should keep that in mind whenever you hear someone talking about how "this was a change election" or "the American people" rose up and demanded that Donald Trump lead them. Trump is going to be the president, but more voters chose Clinton.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-e1e4d364-5ff8-15a7-c02f-e914a5a27125">Now about those allegedly persuadable Trump voters—have you been paying attention to the news in the last year? Because if you were, you would have seen somewhere in the neighborhood of a zillion stories about white voters in places where the factories are closed and folks are struggling, where people feel left behind, alienated, and disempowered. They may have been forgotten by globalization, but they sure weren't forgotten by the news media this year, which couldn't get enough of them.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-e1e4d364-5ff8-15a7-c02f-e914a5a27125">And so many of them gravitated to Donald Trump. But think about what you had to convince yourself to accept if you were one of those voters. You had to say it's all right that this guy lies constantly. It's all right that he encourages violence. It's all right that despite having more potential financial conflicts of interest than any other presidential candidate ever, he's the only candidate in recent history who refuses to reveal his tax returns. It's all right that he has run a series of cons, stealing the life savings from people who put their faith in him in just the way you're putting your faith in him now. It's all right that he's erratic and impulsive and childish and vindictive, to a degree that makes it obvious he has little or no self-control. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-e1e4d364-5ff8-15a7-c02f-e914a5a27125">Convincing yourself of all that is not easy. But once you have, you're invested. You're committed. You've gone a long way down a path from which you're sure as hell not going to be diverted by some well-considered policy proposal from another candidate.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-e1e4d364-5ff8-15a7-c02f-e914a5a27125">In fact, any new information you get is going to be filtered through what you already believe and shaped to fit the conclusion you've already made. For instance, few things drive liberals as batty as when they hear Trump supporters </span><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/13/us/politics/ohioans-tired-of-status-quo-flipped-to-trump-for-change.html">say things</a> like, "He's straightforward and honest," when the truth is that Trump is without question the most dishonest candidate in American history. He spawned an entire mini-industry devoted to cataloguing his many lies, which came at a rate of a few dozen each and every day he campaigned. But when that voter and many others like him say Trump is "honest," they don't mean that he avoids saying things that are false. They mean that he says things other politicians won't, things like "I'd like to punch him in the face" and "Bomb the shit out of 'em" and "They're rapists" (Mexican immigrants, that is), and "Grab 'em by the pussy." That's what they mean by "honest"—that Trump will speak out loud the same things that they think, validating their beliefs so they no longer need to feel ashamed.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-e1e4d364-5ff8-15a7-c02f-e914a5a27125">Hillary Clinton could have kidnapped every one of those voters and forced them to listen to her read her plan for paid family leave, and it wouldn't have made a difference, because Trump was reaching them on a much more visceral level. And nothing she could have said would have been a match for the white nationalist appeal Trump presented.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-e1e4d364-5ff8-15a7-c02f-e914a5a27125"><span class="pullquote-right">It's important that we don't allow ourselves to forget or explain away the fact that racial, ethnic, and religious hatred was the foundation on which the Trump campaign was built.</span> It started before his run, when he emerged as a potent political figure with his vile effort to convince everyone that Barack Obama wasn't a real American. It continued when, in his announcement speech, he said that Mexican immigrants are rapists and criminals. It proceeded when he hired Steve Bannon, media champion of the racist and anti-Semitic "alt-right," to be CEO of his campaign (and now Bannon will have his ear as a kind of co-chief of staff in the White House). It was fed by his use of Twitter to promote white supremacist ideas, his attack on a Muslim Gold Star family, his assault on the judge in his Trump University fraud suit ("He's a Mexican," Trump said by way of explaining why the American-born judge couldn't be impartial). Donald Trump's presidential campaign wasn't kind of racist, or sort of bigoted, or a little bit misogynistic, or maybe based on hate. That was its very essence.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-e1e4d364-5ff8-15a7-c02f-e914a5a27125">And that was one of the biggest reasons people lined up to join in. Those hatreds and resentments were so powerful that they overcame all of Trump's incredible weaknesses and screwups—his constant lying, his exposure as an outright grifter, his refusal to show his tax returns and his bragging about not paying taxes, all of it. There were 15 or 20 things about Trump that would have been fatal for any other candidate but didn't hurt him at all, and it wasn't because of his sparkling wit and compelling ideas. It was because he gave his voters something no one else would.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-e1e4d364-5ff8-15a7-c02f-e914a5a27125">And yes, of course not every one of the 60 million people who voted for Trump is a racist. But what they all have in common is that they decided to support a candidate running a campaign of hatred. When the KKK is so happy about your candidate's victory that it's </span><a href="http://www.latimes.com/nation/politics/trailguide/la-na-updates-trail-guide-kkk-trump-north-carolina-1478822255-htmlstory.html">holding a parade</a> to celebrate, you can't claim that race had nothing to do with the campaign.</p>
<p><span id="docs-internal-guid-e1e4d364-5ff8-15a7-c02f-e914a5a27125">So if Clinton had done something different she might have been able to turn out more of her natural constituencies, and that could have made the difference. But nothing she said to Trump voters would have won any of them over—nothing.</span></p>
</div></div></div>Mon, 14 Nov 2016 10:00:00 +0000226289 at http://prospect.orgPaul WaldmanObama's Plan to Destroy America Has Failed Miserablyhttp://prospect.org/article/obamas-plan-destroy-america-has-failed-miserably
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<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-70fac47f-3bae-13a7-ad74-b22fadd54e80"><span class="dropcap">B</span>arack Obama will be president for only two more months, and any judgment of his presidency will have to account for all he failed to accomplish. Consider this partial list of things Obama was supposed to do but never did:</span></p>
<ul dir="ltr"><li><span id="docs-internal-guid-70fac47f-3bae-13a7-ad74-b22fadd54e80">Destroy America's image and influence in the world</span></li>
<li><span id="docs-internal-guid-70fac47f-3bae-13a7-ad74-b22fadd54e80">Dismantle our military</span></li>
<li><span id="docs-internal-guid-70fac47f-3bae-13a7-ad74-b22fadd54e80">Send us into a Greece-like debt spiral that would crash the economy</span></li>
<li><span id="docs-internal-guid-70fac47f-3bae-13a7-ad74-b22fadd54e80">Institute a government takeover of all health care</span></li>
<li><span id="docs-internal-guid-70fac47f-3bae-13a7-ad74-b22fadd54e80">Kill elderly and disabled people who had become a drain on the system</span></li>
<li><span id="docs-internal-guid-70fac47f-3bae-13a7-ad74-b22fadd54e80">Transition the U.S. to communism</span></li>
<li><span id="docs-internal-guid-70fac47f-3bae-13a7-ad74-b22fadd54e80">Outlaw Christianity</span></li>
<li><span id="docs-internal-guid-70fac47f-3bae-13a7-ad74-b22fadd54e80">Reinstitute the Fairness Doctrine then use it as a tool to silence conservative media</span></li>
<li><span id="docs-internal-guid-70fac47f-3bae-13a7-ad74-b22fadd54e80">Force gas prices up to $8 or $10 a gallon to make driving impossible</span></li>
<li><span id="docs-internal-guid-70fac47f-3bae-13a7-ad74-b22fadd54e80">Open the borders to a flood of undocumented immigrants</span></li>
<li><span id="docs-internal-guid-70fac47f-3bae-13a7-ad74-b22fadd54e80">Confiscate Americans' guns</span></li>
<li><span id="docs-internal-guid-70fac47f-3bae-13a7-ad74-b22fadd54e80">Throw dissenters into concentration camps</span></li>
<li><span id="docs-internal-guid-70fac47f-3bae-13a7-ad74-b22fadd54e80">Force whites to pay reparations to blacks in order to wreak vengeance for the sins of the past</span></li>
<li><span id="docs-internal-guid-70fac47f-3bae-13a7-ad74-b22fadd54e80">Declare martial law and cancel the 2016 election so he could stay in office</span></li>
</ul><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-70fac47f-3bae-13a7-ad74-b22fadd54e80">As I said, that's only a partial list. If you go back to look at the way conservatives were talking eight years ago, the level of panic they demonstrated is nothing short of comical. Sometimes the terms were literally apocalyptic, painting a horrifying picture of the wreckage an Obama presidency would leave behind. But even those who stayed away from the most ridiculous claims agreed that his administration would be an unmitigated disaster. And critically, while they sometimes said that Obama was stupid and incompetent (He can't even talk without a teleprompter, har har!), more often they asserted that it was all a careful plan: Obama wasn't just going to destroy America, he </span>wanted to destroy America.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-70fac47f-3bae-13a7-ad74-b22fadd54e80">This is an idea they have never let go of. You'll recall the primary debates, when Marco Rubio was mocked for </span><a href="https://youtu.be/HNRNHgi1RzU">repeating</a> over and over, "Let's dispel with the notion that Barack Obama doesn't know what he's doing. He knows exactly what he's doing." Rubio is supposed to be one of the sensible Republicans, and his point—which neither his opponents nor any other conservative seemed to disagree with—was that Obama was carrying out a plan to intentionally harm, diminish, or completely destroy the United States of America.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-70fac47f-3bae-13a7-ad74-b22fadd54e80">So here we are, with just weeks to go. How's that plan working out? It appears that it has failed. Obama has overseen the creation of 15 million jobs since the bottom of the Great Recession a year after he took office. Inflation is all but nonexistent, wages are rising, and GDP growth is getting stronger. Gas is at around $2 a gallon, and America is practically energy-independent, due not only to an explosion in the development of renewables but also the spread of fracking, which has vastly increased domestic supplies of oil and natural gas (which somehow happened despite Obama's radical anti-fossil-fuel agenda).</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-70fac47f-3bae-13a7-ad74-b22fadd54e80">And that's just the beginning. America is </span><a href="http://www.pewglobal.org/2016/06/29/as-obama-years-draw-to-close-president-and-u-s-seen-favorably-in-europe-and-asia/">admired</a> all over the world. The Affordable Care Act has some challenges, but it has given 20 million more people health insurance, slowed the rise in health-care spending, and brought unprecedented health security to Americans—without killing any old people and while leaving the bulk of the health-care system in private hands. Obama hasn't opened the borders; in fact, there are <a href="http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/11/03/5-facts-about-illegal-immigration-in-the-u-s/">fewer</a> undocumented immigrants in the U.S. today than there were when he took office. Those FEMA concentration camps were never set up, he didn't turn America communist, and he didn't confiscate anyone's guns. Christianity, as far as I can tell, is still legal.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-70fac47f-3bae-13a7-ad74-b22fadd54e80">And I'm fairly certain he's going to depart the White House in January, even if Donald Trump were to win.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-70fac47f-3bae-13a7-ad74-b22fadd54e80">If you're a conservative, you may be extremely unhappy with the choices Obama has made and the things he has done. But you'd have to admit that the predictions you and your allies made about about how Obama would turn this great country into a hellscape of suffering and despair didn't quite pan out. So what happened?</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-70fac47f-3bae-13a7-ad74-b22fadd54e80"><span class="pullquote-right">There are a few possibilities. First, perhaps Obama just forgot. </span>He was going to take away our guns and outlaw dissent, but you know how it is—other things get in the way, then the holidays roll around, and before you know it eight years have gone by and you haven't even fixed that loose railing in the residence, let alone herded your opponents into concentration camps.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-70fac47f-3bae-13a7-ad74-b22fadd54e80">Or perhaps Obama tried to do all those things but was thwarted by heroic Republicans. But that's not an easy argument to make, particularly when you're also saying that he's a tyrant who spits on the Constitution every day as he goes about doing whatever he wants. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-70fac47f-3bae-13a7-ad74-b22fadd54e80">Or—and stick with me here, because I'm going to suggest something crazy—perhaps Obama was never trying to destroy America in the first place. The things he said about what he wanted to accomplish and how he'd go about it were basically true. He made a bunch of proposals when he ran for president, and at least tried to follow through on the vast majority of them. There wasn't a hidden agenda, there was a genuine agenda, whether you liked it or not. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-70fac47f-3bae-13a7-ad74-b22fadd54e80">And he actually wanted things to go well. Like all presidents he wanted the economy to thrive under his watch, and did what he could to make that happen. He wanted America's foreign policy to succeed. He wanted a health care system that provided security and was as affordable as possible. He didn't want to snuff out free enterprise, or religion, or the spark of hope that burns within every American heart. He was trying to do his best.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-70fac47f-3bae-13a7-ad74-b22fadd54e80">I suspect that many or perhaps even most elite Republicans know this to be true. But they also know that telling their followers that their political opponents are out to destroy all they hold dear is pretty good for business. Just consider </span><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/05/us/a-militia-gets-battle-ready-for-a-gun-grabbing-clinton-presidency.html">an article</a> that ran over the weekend in <em>The New York Times</em>, about gun enthusiasts heading to the Georgia woods for paramilitary training in preparation for the civil war that's sure to come should Hillary Clinton become president. "We thought it was bad under eight years of Obama, but the gun-grabbing is going to get a whole lot worse if Hillary gets elected," one militia member said.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-70fac47f-3bae-13a7-ad74-b22fadd54e80">He has been told in every election he can remember that if the Democrats win they're going to take his guns. It never happens, and yet he's actually convinced that 1) there has been gun-grabbing going on under Obama, and 2) it'll be even worse under Clinton. This nincompoop and millions of people like him are the audience for those predictions of doom whenever a Democratic president is elected. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-70fac47f-3bae-13a7-ad74-b22fadd54e80">Republicans' eagerness to exploit and encourage that kind of stupidity is what makes it so difficult to resolve ordinary political differences. Because in order to resolve them, both sides have to accept that they are in fact ordinary, that the world is not going to end if one side prevails, and that somebody who has a substantive disagreement with you about policy isn't necessarily a demon bent on ripping you open and feasting on your entrails. </span></p>
<p><span id="docs-internal-guid-70fac47f-3bae-13a7-ad74-b22fadd54e80">But that's what Republicans have told their constituents to believe—and despite the fact that their dark predictions about the destruction Obama would wreak never came to pass, they'll be saying the same things about Clinton. In </span><a href="http://www.publicpolicypolling.com/main/2016/10/clintons-florida-lead-continues-to-grow.html">one recent poll</a> of Florida voters, 40 percent of those voting for Donald Trump agreed with the assertion that Clinton is <em>literally a demon</em>. I wish that were a joke, but it isn't. Neither is this election, and neither is the next four years.</p>
</div></div></div>Mon, 07 Nov 2016 10:00:00 +0000226234 at http://prospect.orgPaul WaldmanThe Media Freakout Over the Clinton Email Story Is a Preview of the Next Four Yearshttp://prospect.org/article/media-freakout-over-clinton-email-story-preview-next-four-years
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<p><span class="dropcap">I</span>f there's an archetypal Clinton "scandal" story, it may be the one we saw break on Friday. Some piece of information is revealed, though it really isn't any information at all, just the fact that someone says there might be some information somewhere that we might someday find. There's nothing indicating any wrongdoing on anyone's part. There's nothing to be disturbed or outraged about, yet Republicans dutifully pretend to be disturbed and outraged anyway. And the media react as though they just got an injection of adrenalin, had a quadruple espresso, and then did five lines of coke. An explosion has rocked the campaign! New revelations send Clinton reeling! The race is upended!</p>
<p>If you find this profoundly depressing, then you're going to really hate the next four years.</p>
<p>But before we get to that, let's review. On Friday, FBI director James Comey sent members of Congress a letter that amounted to "Something something Hillary emails," so vague that it could barely be understood. Sure, it was just 11 days before the election, and the Justice Department has a clear policy against doing anything that threatens to be, or even be perceived as, the Department injecting itself into such a volatile political moment. But for whatever reason, Comey decided he simply had no choice.</p>
<p>Then journalists just about lost their minds. To take just one example, Saturday's <em>New York Times</em> had three separate articles about this story on its front page, written with the contributions of no fewer than seven of its top reporters. You'd think we had just learned that Clinton had killed Antonin Scalia with her bare hands before having an affair with Brad Pitt to break up his marriage to Angelina Jolie. By the time the weekend ended, a mountain of column inches and cable news hours had been devoted to the topic. Yet the most striking thing about this whole story is how empty it is.</p>
<p>You'd have to pay close attention to realize it, but there's virtually nothing there. The FBI, investigating Anthony Weiner's sexting with an underage girl, found metadata on his laptop indicating that emails from or to the Clintons' email server had passed through there. They were likely from or to his wife Huma Abedin, who had an account on that server. What were they about—chatting with friends, trading <em>Game of Thrones</em> recaps with co-workers, cat gifs? We don't know. Were any these emails from or to Hillary Clinton? We don't know. Did they contain classified information? We don't know. Was there any indication that somebody somewhere committed a crime? We don't know, because—and this is important—<em>the FBI <a href="https://www.yahoo.com/news/comey-wrote-bombshell-letter-to-congress-before-fbi-had-reviewed-new-emails-220219586.html">hasn't even read them</a></em>. They needed to get a warrant to do so, which they didn't obtain until <a href="http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016-election/fbi-obtains-warrant-newly-discovered-emails-clinton-probe-reid-accuses-n675411">Sunday</a>, two days after Comey made his blockbuster announcement. It'll take weeks to actually determine whether there's anything even remotely interesting there.</p>
<p>Nevertheless, from the moment they heard about Comey's letter, the media locked into Full Clinton Scandal Mode, in which things like facts and evidence are all but irrelevant; all that matters is that "This is out there" and "Questions are being raised."</p>
<p>Meanwhile, Donald Trump goes before his frothing crowds, brings up the issue, and the crowd immediately erupts in lusty cheers. Then he says a bunch of things that aren't true, to which they respond with cries of "Lock her up! Lock her up!" And just as it is with the email issue in general, most voters couldn't tell you what it's about or what Clinton supposedly did wrong, but they know it was something about emails and it must have been shady, or everyone wouldn't be making such a big deal out of it.</p>
<p>As exasperating as this event has been, in the end it likely won't matter much to the outcome of the presidential race. Clinton will probably still win, and we'll just add this to the long compendium of 2016 weirdness (and we still have enough news cycles left for two or three more Trump scandals). But it is as good a template as any for how Clinton's time in office will proceed.</p>
<p>There are two vital things to understand about that future. The first is that <span class="pullquote-right">Republicans will be devoting the bulk of their energies in the next four (or eight) years to finding—or, if that fails, inventing—Clinton "scandals."</span> This isn't a possibility, it's a certainty. Last Wednesday, the <em>Washington Post</em> <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/house-republicans-are-already-preparing-for-years-of-investigations-of-clinton/2016/10/26/e153a714-9ac3-11e6-9980-50913d68eacb_story.html">reported</a> that Representative Jason Chaffetz, chair of the House oversight committee, is already planning on "spending years, come January, probing the record of a President Hillary Clinton." And it won't just be Chaffetz's committee—don't forget that Republicans managed to conduct eight separate congressional investigations of Benghazi in an endless quest to get something on Clinton. If Republicans hold the House, without any actual legislating to distract them they'll do almost nothing but investigate her. They know well, because it was their strategy throughout the 1990s, that if you can't find a scandal you can still create the appearance of a scandal just by launching one investigation after the next, berating administration witnesses, and shaking your fists in the air for the benefit of the cameras.</p>
<p>The second thing to understand is that the news media will eat all this up with a spoon. Washington journalists long ago convinced themselves that the Clintons are corrupt, and there's some kind of Watergate-level scandal about them just waiting for the right intrepid reporter to discover. And just like Republicans, they too know that while a scandal is the best story, a pseudo-scandal is almost as good, because it allows for all kinds of "BREAKING NEWS!!!" chyrons and breathless speculation. As Jonathan Allen <a href="http://www.vox.com/2015/7/6/8900143/hillary-clinton-reporting-rules">wrote</a> in perhaps the best explanation of the special rules that govern how the media treats them, "The Clinton rules are driven by reporters' and editors' desire to score the ultimate prize in contemporary journalism: the scoop that brings down Hillary Clinton and her family's political empire. At least in that way, Republicans and the media have a common interest."</p>
<p>And consider this: If and when Clinton is elected, Republicans will complain bitterly that the news media were too harsh on Donald Trump. This is a complicated issue, but what's undeniable is that Trump has forced journalists to find new ways to talk about a candidate who lies as frequently as Trump, has such contempt for democratic norms, and who attacks journalists themselves so unceasingly and personally. Even if all their decisions in shaping that coverage have been justified, they'll be eager to show they aren't playing favorites, and one of the best ways to show you aren't captive to "liberal bias" is to rake Hillary Clinton over the coals.</p>
<p>The fact that Barack Obama's administration was so remarkably free of scandal may have led you to forget what things were like back in the 1990s, when multiple congressional investigations could be launched on the news that the cafeteria in the basement of the Department of Agriculture ran out of cinnamon crullers last Friday, which was clear evidence that Bill and Hillary were covering up something ghastly and nefarious, if only one could pull hard enough on that thread of suspicion. But it's coming back, have no doubt. And it isn't going to be much fun. </p>
</div></div></div>Mon, 31 Oct 2016 09:00:00 +0000226179 at http://prospect.orgPaul WaldmanWhy Clinton Doesn't Need a "Mandate"http://prospect.org/article/why-clinton-doesnt-need-mandate
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<p>Hillary Clinton greets supporters at a campaign event in Charlotte, North Carolina, on October 23, 2016.</p>
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<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-7643b524-f3ea-aa3f-a4ed-f0c0b6353f18"><span class="dropcap">H</span>illary Clinton is going to be the next president of the United States—there, I said it. Yes, it's possible that in the next two weeks some story so shocking, appalling and horrifying could come out about her that it would throw the election to Donald Trump. But given her clear lead in the polls and her vastly superior ground operation, it would have to be a truly monumental scandal, of the kind Republicans are always dreaming about but can never deliver no matter hard they try. Unless she turns out to maintain a dungeon in Chappaqua where she conducts gruesome medical experiments on kidnapped runaways, this race is unlikely to move enough to keep her from the White House. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-7643b524-f3ea-aa3f-a4ed-f0c0b6353f18">But if and when she does win, you can count on Republicans to insist that she has no "mandate" to enact her agenda. Instead, they'll insist, not only should she put aside the policy proposals she ran on, but it wouldn't hurt to support some of what Republicans want—just as a show of good faith. After all, they'll say, the country doesn't really like her; it was only because she ran against Trump that she became president at all. So it would be terribly presumptuous to go legislating and regulating willy-nilly. And doesn't America need unity now more than ever? She wouldn't want to be a divider, would she?</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-7643b524-f3ea-aa3f-a4ed-f0c0b6353f18">It's important to understand that Republicans will say this no matter how large Clinton's victory is. They'll say it if she squeaks out a win by a point, and they'll say it if she wins by 10. But mandates are baloney.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-7643b524-f3ea-aa3f-a4ed-f0c0b6353f18">We have a closely divided country, and no president is ever going to get the support of any kind of supermajority. <span class="pullquote-right">Even if the president is doing a terrific job, partisanship is intense enough that the best approval rating she can hope for is around 60 percent at most.</span> (President Obama is currently </span><a href="http://www.gallup.com/poll/113980/gallup-daily-obama-job-approval.aspx">at 56 percent in Gallup's poll</a>; it's the highest his approval has been since he was just five months into his first term, during the honeymoon period.) If the president could only pursue her agenda when nearly all Americans were behind her, she'd never be able to do anything.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-7643b524-f3ea-aa3f-a4ed-f0c0b6353f18">Of course, Democrats might well be crying "No mandate!" if the shoe was on the other foot, but it'll be particularly rich coming from Republicans. If ever there was a newly elected president who lacked a mandate, it was the last Republican one, George W. Bush, who got fewer votes than his opponent and was put in office only with the intercession of a friendly Supreme Court. But that didn't stop him from following through on his priorities, most especially his beloved tax cuts, which helped turn the budget surplus Bill Clinton bequeathed him into a significant deficit. I don't recall Republicans telling him that he should dial back his ambitions because he lacked a mandate.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-7643b524-f3ea-aa3f-a4ed-f0c0b6353f18">The truth is that the people who have to approve or reject the president's agenda don't give a damn about mandates one way or the other—they'll support what they want to support and oppose what they want to oppose, whether because of their sincere beliefs or the political demands of their districts and states. For example, after Sandy Hook, the government had a mandate to pass universal background checks, which polls showed were supported by nine out of ten Americans. But that didn't stop Republicans from killing the bill that would have created them, mandate or not. They certainly aren't going to be concerned about whatever mandate Clinton might have gotten just by winning the presidency. How often does a member of Congress say, "I really don't like this bill the president is proposing, but he did win a comfortable majority in the election, so I'm going to have to vote for it. He does have a mandate, after all"? Basically never.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-7643b524-f3ea-aa3f-a4ed-f0c0b6353f18">Yet that's the assumption of the mandate talk: that if the president had achieved some hypothetical margin of victory, then the opposition party would be obligated to step aside and allow her to pass whatever she wants. That will never happen, no matter which party controls the White House.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-7643b524-f3ea-aa3f-a4ed-f0c0b6353f18">The truth is that what determines a president's mandate is the kind of majorities she has (or lacks) in Congress. If she has majorities in both houses that's all the mandate she needs, and if she doesn't, things become much more complicated. That's why in the race's final days, Clinton is </span><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/buoyed-by-rising-polls-clinton-shifts-to-a-new-target-the-house-and-senate/2016/10/22/9c717070-97c3-11e6-bb29-bf2701dbe0a3_story.html">putting</a> more emphasis on helping Democratic candidates for Senate and House; she knows that if Republicans control either one, her ability to get the legislation she wants passed will be approximately zero. You can bet that Republican members of Congress will declare that <em>their </em>mandate is to stop her from enacting her radical socialist agenda.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-7643b524-f3ea-aa3f-a4ed-f0c0b6353f18">And let's be honest: Hillary Clinton doesn't need much of a mandate to move forward on her agenda, which is extremely progressive but hardly revolutionary. What she wants is mostly tweaks, modifications, and reforms to the status quo. She's not proposing any gigantic new government programs, or even sweeping changes to existing ones. You can complain all you want about there not being enough discussion of issues in this race, but it isn't as though she's going to shock the electorate by trying to push through some extraordinarily ambitious changes they had no idea she had in store.</span></p>
<p><span id="docs-internal-guid-7643b524-f3ea-aa3f-a4ed-f0c0b6353f18">So when Republicans start complaining that Clinton has no mandate, remember that what really matters is power: If they have the power to stop her, that's what they'll do, and if she has the power to roll over them, that's what she'll do. "Mandates" have nothing to do with it.</span></p>
</div></div></div>Mon, 24 Oct 2016 09:00:13 +0000226118 at http://prospect.orgPaul WaldmanDonald Trump's Surreal Alternate Realityhttp://prospect.org/article/donald-trumps-surreal-alternate-reality
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<p>Donald Trump speaks during a charity event hosted by the Republican Hindu Coalition on October 15 in Edison, New Jersey.</p>
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<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-7643b524-cfb7-4be2-f757-c245c85507a9"><span class="dropcap">I</span>f you've been around politics and campaigns for even a little while, you probably have a pretty clear sense of what happens behind closed doors with Hillary Clinton and her close advisers. They plan which battleground states she'll visit in the few remaining weeks, go over polling data to see where she's strong and where she's weak, consider how to react to each day's developments in the news, practice for the final debate on Wednesday, talk about the key messages she should emphasize—those kind of things. There's not much mystery there. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-7643b524-cfb7-4be2-f757-c245c85507a9">But when you consider Donald Trump's campaign, one question dominates all others: What the hell are they thinking?</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-7643b524-cfb7-4be2-f757-c245c85507a9">If we're lucky, when the 2016 presidential campaign is over someone within the Trump campaign will pen a tell-all memoir to show the rest of us what this most bizarre presidential candidacy looked like from the inside. But I have to admit, even though I consider myself a reasonably knowledgeable observer—if we go all the way back to when I volunteered for Michael Dukakis as a college student, this is the eighth presidential campaign I've either worked on, studied as an academic, or reported on—I absolutely cannot fathom what goes on when Donald Trump and his inner circle sit down to talk about how things are going.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-7643b524-cfb7-4be2-f757-c245c85507a9">Consider that faced with the most profound crisis of his campaign—the release of a videotape in which he brags about sexually assaulting women, which was then followed by a dozen women (so far) coming forward to say, "Yes, he did that to me"—Trump's </span><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/an-unshackled-trump-an-unmoored-campaign-lurching-to-the-finish-line/2016/10/16/16e09b4c-93aa-11e6-ae9d-0030ac1899cd_story.html">response</a> has been to argue that <em>the women are liars because they're too ugly for him to sexually assault</em>. Other than proclaiming, "Yes, I'm guilty of it all, and I plan to keep on doing it," could there possibly be a worse way to handle those charges?</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-7643b524-cfb7-4be2-f757-c245c85507a9">In an ordinary campaign, Trump would return from one of his increasingly surreal rallies, at which point his advisers would say, "Donald, you can't do that. It's pushing away moderate women voters, and we need them if we're going to win. We're hovering at around 40 percent in the polls, which as you might or might not know, is less than 50 percent. We can't win unless we persuade people who aren't already voting for you."</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-7643b524-cfb7-4be2-f757-c245c85507a9">One of two things must be true. Either they tell him that and he doesn't listen, or they don't tell him that. Could it actually be that within Trump's inner circle, everyone is saying that things are going great, and they just have to keep it up and they're on their way to victory?</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-7643b524-cfb7-4be2-f757-c245c85507a9">In interviews, Trump often mentions the size of his rallies as evidence that he has overwhelming support, and perhaps it's somewhat understandable that this particular datum would play a large role in his thinking. It must be intoxicating to go before 10,000 adoring fans and have them pour rapturous cheers down on you at every word that comes out of your mouth. But after the high wears off, a rational person would understand that big crowds don't necessarily mean that you're ahead in an election in which votes will be cast by at least 130 million people, the vast majority of whom won't be attending any rallies no matter which candidate they support.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-7643b524-cfb7-4be2-f757-c245c85507a9">At the moment we have no way of knowing whether Trump truly appreciates that reality. What we can say is that he seems to be living in an epistemological universe of his own making. And it isn't just because he thinks that the way to show women you're not the kind of guy who would sexually assault people is to call some women too ugly to grope. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-7643b524-cfb7-4be2-f757-c245c85507a9">Indeed, throughout this campaign, Trump has shown that he completely rejects the ways the rest of us learn about and understand the world, how we think about knowledge and information, and what we accept as true and false. The idea that someone else knows more than him about any topic is something Trump utterly rejects. When neutral fact-checkers tell him he's gotten something wrong, he just keeps saying it. When asked whose counsel he seeks on foreign policy, he </span><a href="http://www.politico.com/blogs/2016-gop-primary-live-updates-and-results/2016/03/trump-foreign-policy-adviser-220853">said</a>, "I'm speaking with myself, number one, because I have a very good brain and I've said a lot of things." He also <a href="https://youtu.be/Q26ikbTlQn0">said</a>, "I know more about ISIS than the generals do, believe me." This is nothing new for Trump. In 1984, he <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1984/11/15/donald-trump-holding-all-the-cards-the-tower-the-team-the-money-the-future/8be79254-7793-4812-a153-f2b88e81fa54/">told</a> <em>The Washington Post</em> that he ought to be conducting negotiations with the Soviet Union over nuclear weapons. And what about the fact that he knew nothing about the topic? "It would take an hour and a half to learn everything there is to learn about missiles," he said. "I think I know most of it anyway."</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-7643b524-cfb7-4be2-f757-c245c85507a9">More recently, when intelligence officials told him during classified briefings that the Russian government is behind the hacking into emails from the DNC and now the account of John Podesta, the chair of Hillary Clinton's campaign, he seems to have </span><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-refusal-to-accept-government-assessments-on-russian-hacks-dismays-former-officials/2016/10/14/6d1c7f60-8fc4-11e6-9c52-0b10449e33c4_story.html">decided</a> that they just don't know what they're talking about. "She doesn't know it's the Russians doing the hacking," he said at his second debate with Clinton. "Maybe there is no hacking." I don't even know what he means by that—does he think Podesta give Wikileaks his own emails so they could release them publicly?</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-7643b524-cfb7-4be2-f757-c245c85507a9">You can look at this kind of shameless rejection of reality as politically effective brazenness. But what if he actually believes what he says? </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-7643b524-cfb7-4be2-f757-c245c85507a9">It's clear that when Trump looks out into the world and sees a situation he finds less than satisfactory, his conclusion is that the people who claim to have knowledge must be stupid and uninformed, and simply by virtue of his "very good brain" he knows all he needs to know and could do a far superior job to them. Most of us are prey to that impulse on occasion, but we also are willing to acknowledge that some situations are complex, maybe even more complex than we realize. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-7643b524-cfb7-4be2-f757-c245c85507a9">George W. Bush famously said "I'm the decider," and that is indeed a good part of what the job of being president demands: the ability to take in information and make judgments, often quickly. Sometimes that means listening to people who know more than you, and acknowledging that your prior suspicions might have been wrong or that you've misunderstood or ignored important facts. Does anyone think that's something Donald Trump is capable of?</span></p>
<p><span id="docs-internal-guid-7643b524-cfb7-4be2-f757-c245c85507a9">Right now, Trump has settled on a campaign strategy that involves belittling women in sexist terms, squabbling with his own party's leadership, not bothering to mount much of a ground campaign to get voters to the polls, </span><a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/787632098794467328">whining</a> about media conspiracies against him, and generally acting as though he doesn't need to persuade any more voters as long as he hangs on to the ones he's got. Only from an alternate reality could he or anyone who works for him think that's going to work. Trump's failure to appreciate his actual reality is part of what would make him such a dangerous president—but it's also what may keep him from ever getting the chance.</p>
</div></div></div>Mon, 17 Oct 2016 09:00:43 +0000226061 at http://prospect.orgPaul WaldmanIf the 2016 Campaign Were a Satirical Novelhttp://prospect.org/article/if-2016-campaign-were-satirical-novel
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<p>Donald Trump speaks in Sandown, New Hampshire, on October 6, 2016.</p>
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<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-7643b524-ab3c-39a2-0a31-fac8081c49c4"><span class="dropcap">"</span>Call me Donald" might be the opening line if the 2016 presidential campaign were a novel. Or perhaps, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times—no, actually it was just the worst of times." Either way, that's what this campaign has most come to resemble: a sprawling, outrageous, seriocomic novel aiming its satirical blade a the heart of contemporary American politics and society, focused on a protagonist occupying a space somewhere between antihero and outright villain.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-7643b524-ab3c-39a2-0a31-fac8081c49c4">Think about what the plot of this campaign has involved. The protagonist made a dramatic entrance, shocking and enthralling observers with his immediate and unadorned demagoguery, and his bizarre brand of charisma that captivated the media. Then he vanquished a passel of primary opponents, who tried and failed to fight him in the gutter where he dwelt so comfortably. All the while his supporters growled like an awakened beast, providing moments of drama and violence to propel the story forward. Then came the general election with one surprising set piece after another, each one illuminating some aspect of his twisted character. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-7643b524-ab3c-39a2-0a31-fac8081c49c4">Granted, there are a few details that are a bit too on the nose, violating the first rule every fiction writer learns: "Don't tell me, show me." If this were a novel, our protagonist wouldn't just come out and say things like "</span><a href="https://youtu.be/qjTmUhcRX3I">I'm really rich</a>" or "<a href="https://youtu.be/y2lBz0532wU">I have a very good brain</a>"—the author would find more subtle ways of showing us how insecure he is about his wealth and his intellect. <span class="pullquote-right">So yes, the actual Donald Trump may be too over-the-top even for satire.</span> But we've benefited from periodic flashbacks that fill in our protagonist's backstory: the harsh father he seeks to outdo, the sojourn to military school, the extraordinary string of business failures and penny-ante cons, the early marriages and infidelities, the string of victims (economic and otherwise) left in his wake. There are so many great scenes, like the comical vignette in which he <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/donald-trump-alter-ego-barron/2016/05/12/02ac99ec-16fe-11e6-aa55-670cabef46e0_story.html">pretends</a> to be a PR agent, phoning reporters to trumpet his business genius and sexual magnetism, in the service of the attention and admiration he so desperately seeks.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-7643b524-ab3c-39a2-0a31-fac8081c49c4">And oh, what a cast of supporting characters! The eastern European model wife, plainly uncomfortable on this stage, who's publicly humiliated in the pettiest of plagiarism scandals, then is never heard from again. The two reptilian sons and the daughter smarter than both of them put together, her father's favorite in the creepiest of ways. The bare-knuckled campaign manager, clearly out of his league, replaced by the smarmy lobbyist ousted in his turn when his ties to foreign dictators becomes too much to bear. The aging </span><a href="http://www.cnn.com/2016/04/19/politics/roger-stone-donald-trump/">jester</a> who would make the campaign into a year-long version of "The Aristocrats." The gaggle of close advisers, each more scuzzy than the next, from the former mayor screeching vulgarisms to any camera in sight to the Machiavellian campaign CEO who wants nothing more than to sow destruction, to the slithering TV executive who arrives at the campaign with dozens of victims of sexual harassment on his tail. The scenes of this group together must have a David Mamet feel, full of rapid-fire dialogue illuminating exterior depravity and interior moral degeneracy.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-7643b524-ab3c-39a2-0a31-fac8081c49c4">And that's not all. There's the wacky </span><a href="https://www.statnews.com/2016/08/30/trump-doctor-harold-bornstein/">doctor</a> and the wise but crotchety <a href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/cheats/2016/10/05/ex-trump-accountant-jack-mitnick-he-s-no-tax-genius.html?via=desktop&amp;source=copyurl">accountant</a>, not to mention the parade of people our protagonist fights with: the TV host who should have been on his side, the beauty queen willing to tell the world how he treated her, the upright judge attacked for his ethnicity, and the parents of a fallen soldier—all targets of his wrath. Then there's the running mate, a severe and censorious man who in another time would have been putting independent-minded girls on trial for witchcraft, but who now attempts to ride this careening campaign to save his own faltering career.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-7643b524-ab3c-39a2-0a31-fac8081c49c4">And there's the media chorus, ranging from the outraged to the sycophantic, the dogged pursuers and the ones hyping the spectacle and counting their profits. And we haven't even gotten to the story's antagonist, a complex supporting character in her own right, flawed yet resilient, the protagonist's opposite in so many ways. There are more compelling characters than in <em>Game of Thrones</em>, and there's only one kingdom's throne being fought over. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-7643b524-ab3c-39a2-0a31-fac8081c49c4"><span class="pullquote-right">And now, we might be arriving at our protagonist's final undoing, even before the votes are cast and counted.</span> If this were a novel, that scene might be just a bit more dramatic and focused—instead of the emergence of a video from a few years ago, we'd have a climactic scene where his ugly words are spoken and simultaneously broadcast to a crowd of his supporters, their faces falling in shock and disappointment as his true ugliness is finally revealed to all.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-7643b524-ab3c-39a2-0a31-fac8081c49c4">But in our reality, most of those supporters are barely miffed. They've followed Trump so far down into their own moral depths that when he's revealed bragging about his ability to commit sexual assault with impunity because he's famous, his top media advocate </span><a href="https://twitter.com/BuzzFeedNews/status/784592106857914368">responds</a>, "King David had 500 concubines, for crying out loud," and throughout the land, Trump fans tuned into the channel of family values nod their heads in agreement.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-7643b524-ab3c-39a2-0a31-fac8081c49c4">So this may be a fitting end for this satire's biting commentary on contemporary America (even if conservatives might condemn the story's heavy-handed liberal moralizing), as the craven politicians tolerate our protagonist's attacks on Muslims, African Americans, and Latinos, only to turn their backs on him when his caustic gaze is finally turned on a white woman. But does our protagonist lack the complexity to be a truly great character? Perhaps. There seems to be no repellent character trait he does not contain and almost no glimmer of virtue to be found within him. </span></p>
<p><span id="docs-internal-guid-7643b524-ab3c-39a2-0a31-fac8081c49c4">Yet the story can come to a redemptive end, as his cons are exposed, his sins are laid bare, and his greatest fears are realized. As we reach the conclusion of the tale, our protagonist is becoming just what he worked a lifetime to avoid being: a loser, a chump, a schmuck. Not just the most hated man in America, but the most laughed at. So even if the story wasn't quite believable at times, we may be left with the satisfying feeling that after all that happened, justice was finally done.</span></p>
</div></div></div>Mon, 10 Oct 2016 09:00:32 +0000226001 at http://prospect.orgPaul WaldmanYou Pay Taxes So Donald Trump Doesn't Have Tohttp://prospect.org/article/you-pay-taxes-so-donald-trump-doesnt-have
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<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-8fe9c1e5-87c1-e89e-06bf-92123327648d"><span class="dropcap">C</span>apping off an extraordinary week of blunders and bumbles, Donald Trump learned Saturday night that <em>The New York Times</em> had </span><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/02/us/politics/donald-trump-taxes.html">obtained</a> pages of his 1995 tax return showing that not only did he report a $916 million loss, but according to tax experts, that loss could have enabled him to avoid paying federal taxes for as many as 18 years, even as he made healthy profits after his failures in Atlantic City. For a man who just days earlier had responded "That makes me smart"—to the horror of his campaign advisers, no doubt—when Hillary Clinton accused him of refusing to show his tax returns because he may have paid no federal taxes at all, this was not exactly welcome news.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-8fe9c1e5-87c1-e89e-06bf-92123327648d">But Trump and his allies were ready to spin. Early Sunday morning, he </span><a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/782541307168391168">tweeted</a>, "I know our complex tax laws better than anyone who has ever run for president and am the only one who can fix them." If this argument sounds familiar, it's because he has said the same thing many times about legal forms of influence-buying and political corruption: as someone deeply engaged in that sordid activity, "I alone can fix it," in the words he used in his convention speech.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-8fe9c1e5-87c1-e89e-06bf-92123327648d">But in both cases, the truth is that Trump has neither any ideas about how to actually fix it, nor any evident intention to do so. If you're unacquainted with Trump's plan to change the system to eliminate political corruption, it's because he doesn't have one. Similarly, he doesn't have a plan to make the tax system more fair to ordinary people who don't have the benefit of accountants and lawyers who can bend the system to his will. Indeed, the guiding principle of his tax plan, such as it is, is that wealthy people like him should pay even less than they do now.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-8fe9c1e5-87c1-e89e-06bf-92123327648d">But let's take a moment to consider Trump's claim that only someone with his detailed and nuanced knowledge of the tax code could possibly address its problems. For its story, the <em>Times</em> tracked down Trump's accountant at the time, one Jack Mitnick, who verified that the documents were legitimate. He also said that Trump showed little interest in how tax law worked; when he and his first wife Ivana came to sign documents, Ivana would ask more questions than her husband. "But if Mr. Trump lacked a sophisticated understanding of the tax code, and if he rarely showed any interest in the details behind various tax strategies, Mr. Mitnick said he clearly grasped the critical role taxes would play in helping him build wealth. 'He knew we could use the tax code to protect him,' Mr. Mitnick said."</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-8fe9c1e5-87c1-e89e-06bf-92123327648d">And how. As the <em>Prospect</em>'s Justin Miller recently </span><a href="http://prospect.org/article/trumps-riches-and-real-estate-tax-racket">reported</a>, the real estate industry has been extraordinarily successful in stocking the tax code with enough loopholes and deductions to enable developers like Trump to amass huge fortunes without the inconvenience of paying too much in taxes. And as tax law expert Edward McCaffrey <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2016/10/02/opinions/why-trump-tax-news-is-stunning-mccaffery/index.html">pointed out</a>, we shouldn't assume that the $916 million loss was Trump's own money; he could have lost other people's money, as he is fond of saying he's adept at doing, then used the losses to lower his own tax bill.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-8fe9c1e5-87c1-e89e-06bf-92123327648d">Trump's allies were plainly instructed to characterize the story of the lost near-billion and subsequent tax avoidance as evidence only of Trump's awe-inspiring intellect. "The reality is he's a genius," </span><a href="http://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/meet-press-october-2-2016-n658191">said</a> Rudy Giuliani on <em>Meet the Press</em>, making clear that what Einstein was to theoretical physics, Trump is to tax law. Giuliani also appeared on <em>This Week </em>to <a href="http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/week-transcript-rudy-giuliani-sen-bernie-sanders/story?id=42496702">repeat</a> the hosanna to Trump's glory; asked by George Stephanopoulos to respond to the story, he said, "My response is he's a genius." Completing a glorious bootlicking trifecta, Rudy went on CNN's <em>State of the Union</em> to <a href="http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1610/02/sotu.01.html">say</a>, "The man is a genius. ... It shows what a genius he is." Over on <em>Fox News Sunday</em>, there was by sheer coincidence a similar chorus being <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/transcript/2016/10/02/christie-on-leaked-trump-tax-return-accident-investigation-sen-claire-mccaskill/">sung</a>. "There's no one who's shown more genius in their way to maneuver about the tax code as he rightfully used the laws to do that," said Chris Christie. "And the genius that Donald Trump has been" means that "there's no one who's better suited to change these laws than someone like him." </p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-8fe9c1e5-87c1-e89e-06bf-92123327648d"><span class="pullquote-right">You might want to sit down before you hear the shocking news that Donald Trump's tax plan does not actually reorient the American tax code to make it less generous to the wealthy</span> and more so to those unable to experience the daily wonder of crapping in a gold-plated toilet. </span><a href="http://ctj.org/ctjreports/2016/09/the_distributional_and_revenue_impact_of_donald_trumps_revised_tax_plan.php#.V_GN1PkrKUk">According</a> to Citizens for Tax Justice, the latest iteration of Trump's tax plan would give an average benefit of $200 to people in the bottom 20 percent of the income scale, and $818 to those in the middle 20 percent. Which is nice, but it doesn't quite compare to the average benefit of $88,410 that those in the top 1 percent would get. Among other things Trump would eliminate the inheritance tax entirely (a big relief for Donny Jr., Ivanka, and Eric, though if I were Tiffany I wouldn't be counting any chickens), and has <a href="http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2016/09/16/the_insane_mystery_hanging_over_donald_trump_s_tax_plan.html">suggested</a> that he wants to allow individuals who get their income from "pass-through" entities (like his company) to pay tax at a new 15 percent corporate rate, an absolutely spectacular cut for wealthy people who now pay at the top marginal rate of 39.6 percent.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-8fe9c1e5-87c1-e89e-06bf-92123327648d">In fairness, we don't know for sure if he really wants this pass-through provision, because he </span><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/17/us/politics/trump-tax-plan.html">says</a> contradictory things about it depending on whom he's talking to. But the truth is that the details of Trump's tax plan are essentially irrelevant. If he's elected, he will almost certainly bring a Republican Congress with him, and it will be their tax plan, not his, that they will pass and he will sign.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-8fe9c1e5-87c1-e89e-06bf-92123327648d">And the </span><a href="http://abetterway.speaker.gov/_assets/pdf/ABetterWay-Tax-PolicyPaper.pdf">plan</a> released by Paul Ryan may be even more generous to the wealthy than Trump's. Ryan wants to eliminate the estate tax, cut rates on both wage income and investment income, and slash corporate rates, too. In fact, while the CTJ's analysis says that 44 percent of the benefits of Trump's tax plan go the top 1 percent, <a href="http://ctj.org/ctjreports/2016/06/ryan_tax_plan_reserves_most_tax_cuts_for_top_1_percent_costs_4_trillion_over_10_years.php#.V_GWOvkrKUm">fully</a> 60 percent of the benefits of Ryan's plan are scooped up by those patriotic job creators; they get an average benefit of $137,780, compared to $753 for those in middle and $107 for those at the bottom.</p>
<p><span id="docs-internal-guid-8fe9c1e5-87c1-e89e-06bf-92123327648d">Donald Trump is hardly the only billionaire (if he indeed is one) whose accountants can get them out of paying taxes. But in order to believe that he has even the barest intention of changing the tax system to make that harder for people like him to do, you'd have to ignore what his actual tax plan is, and those of his congressional allies. And you'd have to ignore pretty much everything he's said and done during this campaign. But hey, the guy is a genius—maybe he's playing this at a level so complex none of us mere mortals can understand.</span></p>
</div></div></div>Mon, 03 Oct 2016 09:00:00 +0000225959 at http://prospect.orgPaul WaldmanWhat You Should Really Watch for in Tonight's Debatehttp://prospect.org/article/what-you-should-really-watch-tonights-debate
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<p>A TV cameraman sets up during rehearsals for the presidential debate between Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump at Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York, Sunday, September 25, 2016. </p>
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<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-8fe9c1e5-6424-141d-b9e5-1b251b1396c2"><span class="dropcap">A</span>s we arrive at what some are predicting could be the most-watched presidential debate in history, the speculation is reaching a state of frenzy. Will Trump be calm or crazy? Will Clinton show her personal side? Is Lester Holt going to say anything when Trump claims that Clinton sank the </span><em>Maine</em>, was secretly Tokyo Rose, once made out with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at a party, and wrote all the songs for "<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cop_Rock">Cop Rock</a>"?</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-8fe9c1e5-6424-141d-b9e5-1b251b1396c2">After the debate is over, the questions will, if anything, get even dumber, all about who "won," who got off the best one-liners, and whether "expectations" were met. Nothing is less important after a debate occurs than expectations—once it has already happened, we no longer need to care about what the expectations were, because we can look at what actually occurred. Unless, that is, we want to use those expectations to judge not the candidates but the ones doing the expecting, the reporters and commentators who told everyone what was going to happen. If they were wrong, it might be helpful to understand why, so they can avoid repeating their mistakes. But the last thing we should care about is whether either of the candidates did better or worse than their expectations.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-8fe9c1e5-6424-141d-b9e5-1b251b1396c2">If we put all that drivel aside, there are some things that a reasonable person should watch for in Monday's debate and the two that will follow, as a way of understanding what voters might actually gain from this event as they try to resolve whatever remaining doubts they have and arrive at a decision. Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump could hardly be more different, not just superficially but in ways that have direct and substantial implications for what kind of president each would be. Seeing them stand side by side and respond directly to the things the other one says will probably make these contrasts exceptionally clear. Here are some of the key differences that may emerge in those 90 minutes:</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><strong><span id="docs-internal-guid-8fe9c1e5-6424-141d-b9e5-1b251b1396c2">Optimism v. pessimism</span></strong>. This has to do with both the present and the future. To put it simply, Hillary Clinton looks at America and sees a glass half full, while Donald Trump looks at America and sees a glass of toxic sludge with cockroaches floating inside it, which is also on fire as it sits on a coaster made of raccoon turds. These two differing pictures lead directly to the kind of change that each advocates. Clinton is by nature an incrementalist, which fits in nicely with her assessment of the state of the country. We have some problems, she says, but they're problems that can be solved if we understand them and work hard to fix them. Trump, on the other hand, sees the country's problems as deep and profound, requiring not just technocratic fixes but a smashing of the entire political system.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-8fe9c1e5-6424-141d-b9e5-1b251b1396c2">If you could ask Clinton to look beyond this election and answer as a general matter whether America is going to be OK over the long term whether or not she's elected, she'd almost certainly say yes. Trump, on the other hand, describes the country as already being in a nightmare, which will only get worse absent the singular solution: himself. "Only I can fix it," he said in his convention speech, and his campaign revolves around the idea that it is the force of his personality and singular brilliance that will solve problems. So if we don't elect him, all is lost.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-8fe9c1e5-6424-141d-b9e5-1b251b1396c2">What happens when these two visions come into direct and immediate conflict? For the first time, we'll find out.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><strong><span id="docs-internal-guid-8fe9c1e5-6424-141d-b9e5-1b251b1396c2">Problems are complex v. problems are simple</span></strong>. Because Clinton is a technocrat who has been in government for a long time, she has a grasp of how difficult it can be to tackle a problem like health-care reform or international terrorism. Her lengthy answers to questions about these kinds of problems come from a desire to demonstrate how much she knows, but also from a belief that the problems themselves will take time and effort to solve, and failure is a real possibility. Trump, on the other hand, doesn't seem to see any problem as complex. We'll make great deals, we'll start winning, yada yada yada, America will be a paradise.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-8fe9c1e5-6424-141d-b9e5-1b251b1396c2"><span class="pullquote-right">Needless to say, in a forum where you're only allowed to speak in two-minute chunks, the one selling simple answers has a built-in advantage.</span> But it'll be interesting to see whether Clinton can make a convincing case that serious problems require a serious approach.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><strong><span id="docs-internal-guid-8fe9c1e5-6424-141d-b9e5-1b251b1396c2">Inclusion v. exclusion</span></strong>. Trump is running a campaign of white nationalism, telling Americans that they should fear and hate outsiders, immigrants, and pretty much anyone who doesn't look or speak like you (and you know who "you" are). In contrast, Clinton has been working to reassemble the multi-racial, cosmopolitan coalition that put Barack Obama in the White House and kept him there four years later. If she can lock them down, she'll win.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-8fe9c1e5-6424-141d-b9e5-1b251b1396c2">You can see this contrast clearly in the ways the two candidates talk when they're reaching for patriotic language. Trump has what's basically a tribal appeal: We're great because we're Us, and we're not Them—or at least we were great, back before so many of Them got in. Clinton talks about America as a place of change and growth, where we get better over time in large part because we grow more diverse. Chances are we'll be able to see this difference in the implicit audience for their appeals. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><strong><span id="docs-internal-guid-8fe9c1e5-6424-141d-b9e5-1b251b1396c2">Liberalism v. conservatism</span></strong>. Let's not forget ideology! Despite Trump's lack of interest in policy, it's important to understand that if he becomes president, we're going to get the policy program Republicans have advocated for years—and we're going to get it good and hard. In his first few months in office, congressional Republicans will send him an avalanche of conservative bills, doing things like cutting taxes for the wealthy, making abortions as difficult as possible to obtain, rolling back everything President Obama has tried to do on climate change, undoing regulations on corporations, taking health coverage away from millions of Americans, and dozens more. Trump will sign it all, because he doesn't really care. So we should be watching to see whether he can defend this agenda.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-8fe9c1e5-6424-141d-b9e5-1b251b1396c2">On the other side, Clinton has an extremely progressive program she has pledged to implement, and this is one of her best opportunities to describe it to the public. We should also watch to see what she says about how she'll get it past a Congress that is likely to have at least one house controlled by the GOP, which will do everything in its power to stop her.</span></p>
<p><span id="docs-internal-guid-8fe9c1e5-6424-141d-b9e5-1b251b1396c2">There will be plenty of other contrasts—Clinton deals in specifics while Trump focuses more on broad ideas; Clinton sometimes embraces doubt while Trump exudes certainty; Clinton is comfortable conveying emotions that connect her to other people like empathy and concern, while when Trump reaches for an emotion it's likely to be anger or contempt; Clinton will admit mistakes while Trump tries to argue that even his greatest screw-ups were actually brilliant stratagems in disguise. In fact, it's hard to think of a presidential election where the two candidates were more different in more ways. Now we finally get to see them on the same stage, and one thing no one will be able to say is that there's no meaningful difference between them. </span></p>
</div></div></div>Mon, 26 Sep 2016 09:00:00 +0000225881 at http://prospect.orgPaul WaldmanThe Presidential Campaign Has Descended Into Madnesshttp://prospect.org/article/presidential-campaign-has-descended-madness
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<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-2303ea48-3fc6-2add-1836-21bc07f96adc"><span class="dropcap">M</span>y friends, we have fallen down the rabbit hole. This presidential campaign has completely departed from ordinary reality, into a place where there's no such thing as truth and accountability is a joke—at least for some. I wish I could tell you with confidence that it all will work out in the end, that the electorate will be wise and thoughtful, that we'll only shake our heads and chuckle when we think back on 2016. But I'm no longer so sure. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-2303ea48-3fc6-2add-1836-21bc07f96adc">This is the sequence of events we witnessed over the last few days. On Friday, Donald Trump held an event at which he finally gave up the malignant crusade he has been on for the last five years to convince people that President Obama was not born in the United States. In doing so, however, he told a breathtakingly brazen lie: "Hillary Clinton and her campaign of 2008 started the birther controversy." There just </span><a href="http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/sep/16/donald-trump/fact-checking-donald-trumps-claim-hillary-clinton-/">isn't</a> <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2016/05/06/donald-trumps-ridiculous-claim-that-hillary-clinton-started-the-birther-movement/">any</a> <a href="http://www.factcheck.org/2016/09/trump-on-birtherism-wrong-and-wrong/">debate</a> about this: Neither Clinton nor her campaign ever mentioned the scurrilous rumors about Obama's birthplace in 2008. And in many of the news reports about Trump's event, reporters were unusually forthright in calling this lie for what it was.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-2303ea48-3fc6-2add-1836-21bc07f96adc">Yet by Sunday morning, every Republican had obviously gotten the message: Don't worry about the fact-checks, don't worry about whether everyone knows we're lying, just keep repeating over and over that Hillary Clinton started birtherism.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-2303ea48-3fc6-2add-1836-21bc07f96adc">And so they did. If you were unfortunate enough to watch the Sunday shows, you were fed this rancid tripe with a shovel. "Associates of the Clinton campaign started this Birtherism question in 2007," said Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway on <em>Meet the Press</em>. "We were reminding people where this started. It was used as a smear against Senator Obama by Clinton campaign associates." Later in the program, Republican consultant Alex Castellanos had the gall to complain that the media were being unfair to Trump by tarring him with birtherism. "I think these two candidates are being treated very differently on this very issue, because this is something that Hillary Clinton's campaign started when it was convenient for her. But the media covers it as if it is only Donald Trump" who's been a birther.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-2303ea48-3fc6-2add-1836-21bc07f96adc">On the other shows, the same chorus was sung. "The issue was raised by the Clinton campaign," said Chris Christie on <em>Fox News Sunday</em>. "This started with Hillary Clinton's campaign," Conway said on <em>Face the Nation</em>, powering through host John Dickerson's repeated attempts to get her admit she wasn't telling the truth. His next guest, RNC chairman Reince Priebus, said the same thing: "The preponderance of the evidence shows Hillary Clinton started it." Mike Pence went on <em>This Week</em> and said, "I know there's news reports that trace this birther movement all the way back to Hillary Clinton's campaign back in 2008."</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-2303ea48-3fc6-2add-1836-21bc07f96adc"><span class="pullquote-right">The Trump campaign has obviously figured out that this election is essentially the class bully facing off against the nerdy smart girl on the playground</span>, and "I know you are but what am I?" is the most sophisticated and effective riposte one can offer to any criticism. And lord help us, it's working.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-2303ea48-3fc6-2add-1836-21bc07f96adc">He's been doing it for a while now. When Clinton gave a long and detailed explanation of all the ways Trump has courted bigots and white supremacists and echoed their views, Trump didn't defend himself; instead he came out in front of a crowd and </span><a href="https://youtu.be/cFuLc3GKuYU">snarled</a>, "Hillary Clinton is a bigot!" He runs outright scams like Trump University, the Trump Network, and the Trump Institute meant to separate struggling people from their money, then calls her "Crooked Hillary," and that's that. He doesn't bother to pretend to know anything or care at all when it comes to policy, yet <a href="https://twitter.com/sopandeb/status/775764195266600961">tells</a> his crowds, "Hillary Clinton is running a policy-free campaign. She offers no ideas, no solutions, only hatred and derision."</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-2303ea48-3fc6-2add-1836-21bc07f96adc">Do Trump's supporters buy all that? It's not even the right question anymore. They know it's ludicrous, but they're having the time of their lives. To those who support him, there is literally nothing that Trump says or does that they won't find a justification for. Tell them about how he scammed struggling people out of their money with his various schemes, and they say, hey, he was just being a businessman. Present them with his repellent views and statements, and they say, he just tells it like it is. Show them how many hundreds and hundreds of lies he's told, and they say, shut up because Hillary's the real liar. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-2303ea48-3fc6-2add-1836-21bc07f96adc">That's what <em>Politico</em>'s Michael Grunwald found when he went to the first Trump rally after the birther turnaround to find out how Trump's most ardent fans reacted to his supposed change of heart. "Trump's sudden abandonment of his five-year birther crusade on Friday does not seem to have changed how his supporters view either him or Obama," Grunwald </span><a href="http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/09/trump-supporters-birther-2016-secret-214258">reported</a>. "In interviews at the rally, the birthers and non-birthers all seemed to think that Trump has privately agreed with them all along, and all praised his flip-flop as a shrewd political stratagem to change an inconvenient subject."</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-2303ea48-3fc6-2add-1836-21bc07f96adc">For a while it was reasonable to believe that once people really understood who Trump is, Clinton would win in a landslide. We know now that won't happen. In fact, as we've learned more about Trump and he's been out campaigning longer, it has turned out that he's a thousand times worse than anyone imagined when this all began—not just a buffoon, not just an ignoramus, not just shallow and cruel and stupid, but a figure as sinister as anyone in contemporary public life. When he began the race, even informed people had no idea how many grifts like Trump University he has pulled, or that he'd give so much aid and comfort to white supremacists, or that his foundation is itself a scam, or that he'd think he could continue to make money from hundreds of overseas partnerships but never release his tax returns so that we can understand the scope of his conflicts of interests, or that he was not just a guy who liked to exaggerate but a positively pathological liar. At first we found him ridiculous and comical, but we didn't know the half of it.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-2303ea48-3fc6-2add-1836-21bc07f96adc">Yet here we are, seven weeks from election day with the race essentially tied. There will almost certainly be more Trump scandals, but they won't change anything. There is no gaffe Trump will commit, no outrageous statement he'll make, no new disclosure from examinations of his businesses, that will undo his campaign. When it comes to Trump, nothing matters anymore. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-2303ea48-3fc6-2add-1836-21bc07f96adc">It isn't that Trump's supporters are untroubled by his reversals and lies. It isn't that they put them aside in favor of a greater purpose. No, </span><em>they love it</em>. They cackle in glee and revel in their part in the greatest scam of all. Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton's supporters toss and turn at night wondering if she's trustworthy enough because she doesn't rush to inform reporters every time she's feeling sick.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-2303ea48-3fc6-2add-1836-21bc07f96adc">In a few days some pollster will come out with a survey showing that half of the public believes that Hillary Clinton started the birther controversy, despite all the fact-checks and all the emphatic assertions from journalists that it just isn't true, and despite Trump's five years promoting that noxious, racist lie. Never has the truth mattered less. </span></p>
<p><span id="docs-internal-guid-2303ea48-3fc6-2add-1836-21bc07f96adc">When Trump </span><a href="https://youtu.be/iTACH1eVIaA">said</a> back in January, "I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn't lose any voters," he was right. In fact, he could do much worse. And yet he might become president of the United States, the most powerful person on Earth. This is the place of madness we have reached. </p>
</div></div></div>Mon, 19 Sep 2016 09:00:00 +0000225835 at http://prospect.orgPaul WaldmanDonald Trump's Weak Version of Strengthhttp://prospect.org/article/donald-trumps-weak-version-strength
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<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-2303ea48-1b41-a1bf-ddf9-855ffa964880"><span class="dropcap">D</span>onald Trump just can't stop lavishing praise on Vladimir Putin, and there are two things he never fails to mention whenever the subject of the Russian president comes up. The first is that he has almost no choice but to exalt Putin, because he thinks Putin called him brilliant. "If he says great things about me, I'm going to say great things about him," Trump </span><a href="http://www.npr.org/2016/09/09/493289326/donald-trumps-long-embrace-of-vladimir-putin">says</a>, though he doesn't explain why that's so important (not to mention the fact that the word Putin used to describe Trump <a href="http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016-election/did-putin-really-call-trump-brilliant-experts-say-it-got-n644866">translates</a> not as "brilliant" but as "colorful"). The second thing Trump always says about Putin is that he's a "strong leader," and much stronger than President Obama.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-2303ea48-1b41-a1bf-ddf9-855ffa964880">It's this quality of strength that has Republicans </span><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-moves-praise-for-putin-closer-to-the-mainstream-of-the-gop/2016/09/09/ccf2853c-7693-11e6-8149-b8d05321db62_story.html">rushing</a> to back Trump up on this score and express their own admiration for Putin. "I think it's inarguable that Vladimir Putin has been a stronger leader in his country than Barack Obama has been in this country," <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2016/09/08/politics/mike-pence-on-donald-trump-vladimir-putin/">says</a> Trump's running mate Mike Pence. "And that's going to change the day that Donald Trump becomes president." To paraphrase something Trump likes to say about winning, when he's elected president there'll be so much strength you'll get tired of all the strength.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-2303ea48-1b41-a1bf-ddf9-855ffa964880">Vladimir Putin is, undoubtedly, strong. But so was Stalin, and Attila the Hun, and Pol Pot, and ... I'll stop there. So why is it that we consider strength, apart from any context or specifics, something that is so necessary and admirable in a leader?</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-2303ea48-1b41-a1bf-ddf9-855ffa964880">We've associated strength with leadership since before we were even human. The gorilla best able to beat the stuffing out of his rivals gets to be alpha male for as long as he's the strongest, and even in 2016 we haven't fully left the association of physical power and leadership behind, even if we aren't choosing our presidents in a powerlifting contest. There's a reason that George W. Bush cleared brush on his "ranch" while Ronald Reagan chopped wood, all for the benefit of photographers—they wanted the public to see them as manly and vigorous, no matter how tenuous the connection between physical strength and presidential success might be. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-2303ea48-1b41-a1bf-ddf9-855ffa964880">Like Putin, they knew the value of a good photo op. But it wasn't Putin's hairless, doughy chest that won him Donald Trump's heart. It was his iron fist—crushing the press, having his political opponents arrested or murdered, and extending his rule indefinitely, all in a country that claims to be a democracy. That's the strength Trump admires, the willingness to achieve your own ends no matter how much harm you might do to others.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-2303ea48-1b41-a1bf-ddf9-855ffa964880">Even if most Americans might disagree on Vladimir Putin's virtue (though now that Putin is on Team Trump and vice-versa, Republicans are </span><a href="http://www.vox.com/2016/9/9/12865678/trump-putin-polls-republican">coming around</a> on him), we've long believed that strength is an unalloyed good. Pollsters <a href="http://electionstudies.org/nesguide/toptable/tab7c_8.htm">have</a> <a href="http://electionstudies.org/nesguide/toptable/tab7c_4.htm">asked</a> for decades whether voters consider candidates to be strong leaders, and their answers correlate highly with their choice for president.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-2303ea48-1b41-a1bf-ddf9-855ffa964880">There's no value in weakness per se, but strength can come in many forms that might be beneficial to a president. We'd want a president to be morally strong, willing to do the right thing even when there might be a cost to themselves. We'd want them to have the intellectual and emotional strength to reason clearly in the midst of crises, which every president will face. We'd want them to cultivate our own national resilience, to have the strength to demonstrate leadership at trying times. And we'd want them not to let fear cloud their reaction to foreign threats or domestic problems.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-2303ea48-1b41-a1bf-ddf9-855ffa964880">But we all know that when someone like Donald Trump talks about strength, that's not what he means. Which makes him right at home in his party: <span class="pullquote-right">In certain conservative circles, strength often means things like an eagerness to send other people's children to war and the willingness to order other people to commit acts of brutality.</span> This is why they consider a president like Barack Obama, who is suspicious of military adventures and eager to find diplomatic solutions to international problems, to be hopelessly weak (though they simultaneously consider him a tyrant; figure that one out).</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-2303ea48-1b41-a1bf-ddf9-855ffa964880">For instance, </span><a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/dangers-rise-as-america-retreats-1473461151">this rancid op-ed</a> from Dick and Liz Cheney says that "Defeating our enemies has been made significantly more difficult by the policies of Barack Obama. No American president has done more to weaken the U.S., hobble our defenses or aid our adversaries." Cheney the elder, architect of the single most catastrophic foreign policy decision in American history, is particularly incensed by the fact that Obama ended the Bush administration's torture program. In addition to demanding that the next president begin torturing prisoners again, they want to junk the Iran nuclear agreement, then "make clear that all options are on the table where Iran's nuclear program is concerned." In other words, the way to achieve peace and security is to allow Iran to go ahead and resume its pursuit of nuclear weapons, then use that as the justification for some future invasion or other large-scale military action. If nothing else, they'll know we're strong.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-2303ea48-1b41-a1bf-ddf9-855ffa964880">Donald Trump may claim (falsely) that he opposed the Iraq War from the beginning, and periodically express skepticism about overseas adventures. But that won't bother most Republicans, because no candidate has ever fetishized the conservative brand of strength more than he does. Whether he's assuring a debate audience that his hands are normally sized, </span><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2016/06/29/trumps-response-to-terrorism-is-both-weak-and-barbaric/?utm_term=.151d60f3684a">saying</a> that we have to torture prisoners because ISIS "probably think[s] we're weak," <a href="https://youtu.be/p5s9kpPZBbg">telling</a> his bloodthirsty crowds that the way to deal with protesters is to "knock the crap out of 'em," or <a href="https://thinkprogress.org/to-defeat-isis-trump-openly-suggests-committing-war-crimes-dd361b966606#.nqn2dnnqq">suggesting</a> that we murder the families of suspected terrorists, Trump is offering exactly the brand of strength Republicans love. It's what you get when you bake together a tribalistic morality with a crippling insecurity. And like so much of what Trump has said and done, it takes what Republicans ordinarily clothe in subtext and euphemism, then slaps it right on the table for everyone to see.</p>
<p><span id="docs-internal-guid-2303ea48-1b41-a1bf-ddf9-855ffa964880">It's something to behold, no question about that. But strong? Hardly.</span></p>
</div></div></div>Mon, 12 Sep 2016 09:00:00 +0000225799 at http://prospect.orgPaul WaldmanDonald Trump and the Plan of No Planhttp://prospect.org/article/donald-trump-and-plan-no-plan
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<p>Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump gives a thumbs up during a visit to the childhood home of Dr. Ben Carson, Saturday, September 3, 2016, in Detroit. </p>
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<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-2303ea48-f778-a0e0-c56c-b21040d1e8b2"><span class="dropcap">I</span>n the course of trying to sell himself to African Americans—or to convince white moderates that he isn't a despicable bigot by making a show of trying to sell himself to African Americans—Donald Trump has said that unlike Democratic politicians, he can deliver jobs. "You're living in your poverty," he </span><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/25/us/politics/donald-trump-black-voters.html">says</a>, "your schools are no good, you have no jobs, 58 percent of your youth is unemployed—what the hell do you have to lose?" The 58 percent figure is <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2016/08/24/trumps-misleading-claim-that-58-percent-of-black-youth-are-unemployed/">bogus</a> (as you might expect), and the rest of what he says practically oozes contempt (also as you might expect), but underneath it there's an argument that's worth considering, for African Americans and everyone else: Can Donald Trump deliver jobs?</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-2303ea48-f778-a0e0-c56c-b21040d1e8b2">That's the supposed appeal of every businessman candidate: Unlike those Washington politicians, I have a deep understanding of the economy, and armed with this knowledge and experience I can do what they can't. Or as Trump's </span><a href="https://youtu.be/4obk0P2YCFg">ads</a> say, "In Donald Trump's America, working families get tax relief. Millions of new jobs created. Wages go up. Small businesses thrive. The American Dream: achievable." Well that sounds great! I hope that even if Trump loses he shares whatever secret wisdom he has with Hillary Clinton, so perhaps she can deliver us to this paradise on his behalf.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-2303ea48-f778-a0e0-c56c-b21040d1e8b2">But something interesting happens when Trump is asked exactly </span>how he's going to create those millions of jobs. Take, for example, <a href="http://nbc25news.com/news/nation-world/trump-on-black-voters-were-just-starting-our-outreach-right-now">this interview</a> Trump did with a local TV station in Michigan. When anchor Dave Bundy asked what Trump's plan was to bring jobs to African Americans, he responded, "I do have a plan. We're bringing our jobs back. You look at all the empty factories, all the empty warehouses you have all over this area." Bondy then pressed him: "Is there an exact plan how to do that?" Here's Trump's reply:</p>
<blockquote><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-2303ea48-f778-a0e0-c56c-b21040d1e8b2">Yeah, sure. I mean, but basically, we have to bring our jobs back. I mean, the real plan is we have to negotiate trade deals that are good deals, not bad deals. And we're gonna renegotiate these horrible trade deals that have been made by people that don't know what they're doing. ... And we're going to bring our jobs back. I mean, you look at the African American community, there are no jobs—there's nothing you can do</span>—there are no jobs. And we're gonna bring our jobs back from Mexico and from lots of other places that have taken them. And we're gonna get people that have, not only jobs, but really good paying jobs.</p>
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<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-2303ea48-f778-a0e0-c56c-b21040d1e8b2">So how will Trump bring jobs? By bringing jobs! Now why didn't anybody else think of that? And also "renegotiating" trade deals, though he never actually says what that renegotiation would entail, other than presumably going to China to say, "Hey China, give us back our jobs!" On the other hand, fewer than one in 11 Americans now works in manufacturing, and the idea that after a couple of renegotiated trade deals we're all going to be sewing tube socks and assembling iPhones for fantastic wages is, shall we say, less than realistic.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-2303ea48-f778-a0e0-c56c-b21040d1e8b2">We all know that Trump is a spectacularly shallow candidate. But even here, on his supposed area of expertise, it's obvious that "How?" is a question he is utterly incapable of answering. Perhaps he's never really thought about it, or perhaps he thinks he'll just improvise once he becomes president. I'd be curious to hear what Donald Trump thinks a president does when it comes to the economy. <span class="pullquote-right">What does he imagine he'd be doing when he sits down at his desk in the Oval Office? </span> </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-2303ea48-f778-a0e0-c56c-b21040d1e8b2">Nevertheless, many voters believe that Trump must have the ability to make the economy flourish, because he's a businessman—no matter how ludicrous is the idea that building hotels and casinos qualifies someone to set macroeconomic policy for the nation. The polls have wavered on this question, but usually show </span><a href="http://money.cnn.com/2016/08/14/news/economy/donald-trump-hillary-clinton-economy/">about as many</a> people saying that Trump would do a better job on the economy as saying Hillary Clinton would.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-2303ea48-f778-a0e0-c56c-b21040d1e8b2">It may be that by saying they think Trump would do a better job, conservative respondents are saying nothing more than that they prefer conservative policies, which Trump would be more likely to implement. And if you set aside Trump's opposition to existing trade agreements, everything he offers on the economy is standard Republican fare: Cut taxes on the wealthy, remove regulations on corporations, and watch while all Americans are lifted up on a glorious tide of prosperity.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-2303ea48-f778-a0e0-c56c-b21040d1e8b2">In a better world, Hillary Clinton might say this: Donald Trump is offering magic on the economy, and I have have no magic to offer. I don't think the voters are so dumb that I can tell you that if you elect me, in a couple of weeks everyone will be driving a BMW. But Trump and I do have two different basic ideas about what government and the president can do about the economy. And it's not like these ideas have never been tested before. All you have to do is look at the economic records of recent Republican and Democratic presidents to know which one produces better results. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-2303ea48-f778-a0e0-c56c-b21040d1e8b2">The real secret is that while the actions of the federal government can matter greatly, no president, no matter how wise, is going to single-handedly transform the economy. That's part of the problem: Once a candidate starts getting specific, it becomes harder to believe that their policies are going to be revolutionary, even if you think most of them are good ideas. </span></p>
<p><span id="docs-internal-guid-2303ea48-f778-a0e0-c56c-b21040d1e8b2">So Trump has solved the problem. How's he going to create jobs? By creating jobs. How's he going to increase wages? By increasing wages. And how's he going to make America great? By making America great, of course. Sounds like quite a plan.</span></p>
</div></div></div>Mon, 05 Sep 2016 09:00:00 +0000225777 at http://prospect.orgPaul WaldmanEven on His Signature Issue, Donald Trump Can't Figure Out What He Believeshttp://prospect.org/article/even-his-signature-issue-donald-trump-cant-figure-out-what-he-believes
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<p>Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump arrives to speak at a campaign rally in Manchester, New Hampshire, Thursday, August 25, 2016. </p>
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<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-2303ea48-d3c7-63ba-15cc-32b21e772557"><span class="dropcap">T</span>his Wednesday, Donald Trump will be giving what he </span><a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/770040258796855296">describes</a> as a "major speech" on immigration. Presumably, this will be one of the ones he reads off a teleprompter, which allows his staff to make sure he says just what they want him to. Of course, that won't stop him from saying something completely different the next time he speaks off the cuff, which usually happens within 48 hours of one of these "clarifying" speeches wherein he attempts to bring some coherence to all his contradictory statements.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-2303ea48-d3c7-63ba-15cc-32b21e772557">But is anyone's mind going to be changed by anything Trump has to say at this point on immigration?</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-2303ea48-d3c7-63ba-15cc-32b21e772557">That's another way of asking whether anything at all will change in this race between now and November. After all, this is Donald Trump's signature issue, the one with which he bludgeoned his primary opponents as soft-hearted supporters of "amnesty," and the one with which he began his campaign, saying in his announcement speech last year, "When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best. ... They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people." He had to assume the last part, because you never know with these people.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-2303ea48-d3c7-63ba-15cc-32b21e772557">One might have thought that if there were anything Trump could take a consistent position on, it was the horror of immigration. But that turns out not to be the case. Last week, he first moved away from his previous assertion that he'd create a "deportation force" rounding up 11 million people, </span><a href="http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/donald-trumps-softening-immigration-latest-flip-flop/story?id=39063811">saying</a>, "There certainly can be a softening, because we're not looking to hurt people." Then he denied that he had said any such thing. "I don't think it's a softening," he <a href="http://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2016/08/26/donald-trump-intv-cooper-ac-part-1.cnn">told</a> Anderson Cooper. "I've had people say it's a hardening, actually." It's a big, manly, turgid hardening, I tell you!</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-2303ea48-d3c7-63ba-15cc-32b21e772557">But now he was saying only that criminal aliens would be deported, while the rest ... well, it's impossible to know what he actually thinks, because the story seems to change every time he opens his mouth. Meanwhile, his surrogates </span><a href="http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/293581-pence-nothing-has-change-about-trumps-immigration-plans">insist</a> that nothing in his proposed policy has changed, unless there's some element of it people don't like, in which case he never said what he said in the first place. Or something like that—it's a little hard to tell. RNC Chair Reince Priebus <a href="http://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/meet-press-august-28-2016-n639011">said</a> on <em>Meet the Press</em> that the confusion would soon be cleared up, because "now he's reflecting on it and his position is going to be known." I picture Trump gazing out the window of his penthouse apartment, deep in reflection.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-2303ea48-d3c7-63ba-15cc-32b21e772557">For the moment, what we're left with is that if Donald Trump were president, there might or might not be a deportation force to round up the 11 million undocumented immigrants, who might or might not be deported, and for whom there might or might not be a path to citizenship. He also might or might not still believe that we should amend the Constitution to eliminate birthright citizenship, the principle that anyone born in America is an American citizen no matter who their parents are. The only thing we know for sure is that he'd build a wall on our Southern border. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-2303ea48-d3c7-63ba-15cc-32b21e772557">One unsurprising thing these gyrations make clear is that Trump hasn't given much thought to the details of immigration policy, despite the fact that it's the centerpiece of his presidential campaign. It's as if he never contemplated that anyone might ask him specific questions about what would happen in a Trump presidency, and now that they're doing so, he's casting about in confusion. I'm guessing his advisers can't quite come to a consensus either; <span class="pullquote-right">Trump has the distinctive sound of someone who's having contradictory things whispered in his ear.</span></span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-2303ea48-d3c7-63ba-15cc-32b21e772557">But here's something that Trump himself would probably be surprised to hear: His own voters are far less hardline on immigration than he seems to assume. Take a look at </span><a href="http://www.people-press.org/2016/08/25/on-immigration-policy-partisan-differences-but-also-some-common-ground/">this recent poll</a> from the Pew Research Center, which makes clear that not only do most Americans not share his view of undocumented immigrants as being criminals and miscreants, even most <em>Republicans </em>disagree with him. Sixty-three percent of Republicans said that undocumented immigrants mostly fill jobs Americans don't want to do. Sixty-five percent of Republicans said the undocumented are as honest and hard-working as American citizens. And 52 percent said they're no more likely <span style="font-size: 13.008px; line-height: 20.0063px;">to commit crimes </span><span style="font-size: 13.008px; line-height: 1.538em;">than citizens are. All those figures are even higher among Democrats, but what's so remarkable is how majorities of Republicans reject the picture Trump paints.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-2303ea48-d3c7-63ba-15cc-32b21e772557">That last finding in particular might shock Trump, who has a particular bit of theatricality he sometimes uses at rallies, where he calls relatives of people killed by undocumented immigrants (some in crimes, some in traffic accidents) up to the stage. The message is clear: Immigrants are killing people, and should be hated and feared. But most Republicans seem to have grasped the actual fact, which is that immigrants commit </span><em><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/07/02/surprise-donald-trump-is-wrong-about-immigrants-and-crime/">fewer</a></em> crimes than native-born citizens.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-2303ea48-d3c7-63ba-15cc-32b21e772557">How is it that Republicans as a group have these views, when Trump won the GOP nomination in large part because of this issue? It's because what he won in the primaries was a plurality of a minority of Republicans, who in turn represent a minority of all voters.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-2303ea48-d3c7-63ba-15cc-32b21e772557">Here's how the math works. Trump </span><a href="http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2016/president/republican_vote_count.html">won</a> 13 million votes in the primaries, out of nearly 30 million that were cast. But most people who call themselves Republicans didn't vote in their primaries. As a point of comparison, in 2012 Mitt Romney got over 60 million votes. And primary voters tend to be more committed partisans and farther from the center ideologically—the ones most likely get worked into a froth by talk of amnesty and criminal aliens.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-2303ea48-d3c7-63ba-15cc-32b21e772557">Even if Trump succeeded in part by bringing in new voters besotted by his bombastic rhetoric on issues like immigration (as he has often claimed), it would only skew the views of his primary supporters even further. That's not to mention that Trump seems to get most of his information about the state of American opinion from his rallies; he's currently </span><a href="http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/trumps-baffled-why-am-i-not-doing-better-the-polls">convinced</a>, like many candidates before him, that the polls showing him trailing must be wrong since so many people show up to cheer him on. And as we've seen so often, there are few things that excite a Trump crowd like a promise to keep out foreigners.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-2303ea48-d3c7-63ba-15cc-32b21e772557">Let's give Trump the benefit of the doubt for a moment and imagine that once he and his staff figure out what he actually believes, Trump will have an immigration plan that he'll stick to from this point forward. What would really change? Would his passionate supporters decide that he's a squish on immigration after all and decide to stay home? I doubt it—for them it was never about the details, it was about the feeling he gave them. And they know he's the same xenophobe they fell in love with, no matter what he might say.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-2303ea48-d3c7-63ba-15cc-32b21e772557">And what about those who rejected him for the same reason? Will the Latinos who heard him </span><a href="http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/282172-trump-doubles-down-on-judge-attacks-hes-a-mexican-were">say</a> that the judge in his fraud case couldn't be impartial because "He's a Mexican" (the judge is actually an American; he's no more "a Mexican" than Trump is "a German") suddenly say, "Hey, now that I've heard that the 'deportation force' might not happen, maybe Trump isn't such a bad guy after all"?</p>
<p><span id="docs-internal-guid-2303ea48-d3c7-63ba-15cc-32b21e772557">If you think that's going to happen, I've got a wall to sell you. A big, beautiful wall.</span></p>
</div></div></div>Mon, 29 Aug 2016 09:00:00 +0000225735 at http://prospect.orgPaul WaldmanThe Article Trump Wishes the Dishonest Media Would Writehttp://prospect.org/article/article-trump-wishes-dishonest-media-would-write
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<p>Donald Trump speaks during a campaign rally at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Connecticut, on August 13, 2016.</p>
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<p dir="ltr"><span class="dropcap"><span>D</span></span><em><span>onald Trump has been complaining loudly in recent days that the media are not covering him fairly. Among other things, he says they distort his words and don't give an accurate picture of the full glory of his campaign events. As he </span><a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/764805340823248896">tweeted</a> on Sunday, "My rallies are not covered properly by the media. They never discuss the real message and never show crowd size or enthusiasm."</em></p>
<p dir="ltr"><em><span id="docs-internal-guid-c83b960a-8bd0-4bc2-1f0a-b61f2c3bdb45">The role of media critic is a familiar one for Trump; for years he has been known to mail reporters copies of the articles they write about him, with critical comments written across them in marker. But since attacking the media's coverage is taking on a new urgency, and apparently </span><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/08/14/trumps-campaign-continues-to-blame-disgusting-and-corrupt-media">a great deal</a> of Trump's time, I thought I'd imagine what kind of story about his campaign events would meet with Donald Trump's approval. It would have to be something like this:</em></p>
<h3 dir="ltr"><strong><span id="docs-internal-guid-c83b960a-8bd0-4bc2-1f0a-b61f2c3bdb45">Trump Draws Enormous, Fantastic Crowd, I Mean It's Incredible</span></strong></h3>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-c83b960a-8bd0-4bc2-1f0a-b61f2c3bdb45">FAIRFIELD, CT — Republican nominee Donald Trump brought his extraordinary campaign to Make America Great Again to a university gymnasium here Sunday night, leaving the entire state simultaneously excited, hopeful, and dazed at the majesty and splendor of a Trump appearance, knowing that in some small way they had contributed to the salvation of our country. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-c83b960a-8bd0-4bc2-1f0a-b61f2c3bdb45">Showing the unstoppable charisma that enabled him to vanquish 16 opponents in the primaries, Trump explained to the crowd just how he would destroy ISIS and eliminate crime here at home. His unquestionably larger-than-average hands cycled through a series of gestures, each one more powerful and emphatic than the last, as the audience was almost forced to lean back as the overwhelming flood of manly virility emanating from the podium washed over them. The women in attendance were particularly enthusiastic—more than a few of them were seen to open the top button of their blouses and fan themselves as they gazed up in rapture at the stage. Not that he asks for that sort of thing; it just happens, and what is he supposed to do? </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-c83b960a-8bd0-4bc2-1f0a-b61f2c3bdb45">Trump was interrupted multiple times by loser protesters, who were the worst people, just the worst. While in the old days they would have been set upon and torn limb from limb, something they richly deserved, both the candidate and his supporters waited patiently until the scum-sucking worms were escorted out of the arena.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-c83b960a-8bd0-4bc2-1f0a-b61f2c3bdb45">As he does at virtually every rally, Trump spent a significant amount of time explaining the shortcomings of the press that travels with him. "I'm not running against Crooked Hillary Clinton," he </span><a href="http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016-election/his-words-19-notable-thoughts-donald-trump-n630446">said</a>. "I'm running against the crooked media. That's what I'm running against. It's true. I'm not running against Crooked Hillary Clinton." His detailed and nuanced argument mentioned specific reporters and outlets whose work has been unfair, and covered both electronic and print media. "CNN is disgusting and by the way, their ratings are going down big league, you know why? Because I refuse to be interviewed, and I get high ratings, what can I tell you?" Trump <a href="http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016-election/his-words-19-notable-thoughts-donald-trump-n630446">said</a>. His criticisms, all the more biting because they're true, also included <em>The New York Times</em>, which as everyone knows is failing and will probably go out of business soon. "Real garbage," he <a href="https://twitter.com/SopanDeb/status/764634576434171904">said</a>. "They're garbage. It's a garbage paper."</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-c83b960a-8bd0-4bc2-1f0a-b61f2c3bdb45"><span class="pullquote-right">This incisive critique had reporters in attendance staring at their shoes like the weak little boys and girls they are.</span> In response, many in the audience turned to the reporters held in a fenced-off pen and politely </span><a href="https://twitter.com/SopanDeb/status/764630799652102144">shared</a> their <a href="https://twitter.com/frankthorp/status/763894345959440384">agreement</a> with Trump's observations about the media.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-c83b960a-8bd0-4bc2-1f0a-b61f2c3bdb45">When Trump brought up his plans to build a big, beautiful wall across the border with Mexico (which everyone knows the Mexicans will pay for), some young men in the crowd </span><a href="https://twitter.com/KatyTurNBC/status/764617413249732609">were seen</a> holding up their middle fingers and yelling "F--- Mexico!"—an entirely justified if slightly overenthusiastic expression of their concern about the impact of undocumented immigration on wages for workers with limited education and skills. This demonstrated not only how Trump's message is resonating with voters' economic anxiety, but also how excited young people are about his campaign.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-c83b960a-8bd0-4bc2-1f0a-b61f2c3bdb45">But there were less upbeat words, too. Trump explained to the assembled crowd that despite low unemployment (at least as reported by rigged federal government numbers) and the highest per capita income of any state in the country, their home is actually a miserable rathole where nobody has a job and nobody makes anything. "The good news is you can't move," he </span><a href="http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016-election/his-words-19-notable-thoughts-donald-trump-n630446">added</a>, "'cause you can't get anything for your house, so don't worry about it."</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-c83b960a-8bd0-4bc2-1f0a-b61f2c3bdb45">While nearly all polls taken recently have </span><a href="http://elections.huffingtonpost.com/pollster/2016-general-election-trump-vs-clinton">shown</a> Trump trailing Crooked Hillary Clinton by between five and ten points, it's well known, and lots of people are saying this, that the polls are rigged to favor Clinton. In fact, there was that one poll that showed the candidates almost even, which analysts say shows that Trump is actually winning. Bigly.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-c83b960a-8bd0-4bc2-1f0a-b61f2c3bdb45">It is becoming increasingly clear that the only way a candidate as beloved as Trump can lose is if the Democrats steal the election. While so-called "experts" </span><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/08/06/a-comprehensive-investigation-of-voter-impersonation-finds-31-credible-incidents-out-of-one-billion-ballots-cast/">say</a> that voter impersonation is absurdly rare, Trump is encouraging patriotic citizens to go to polling places in "<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/08/12/trump-urges-pennsylvania-backers-dont-just-vote-watch-for-signs-of-cheating-on-election-day/">certain areas</a>" and keep an eye out for people voting ten times, which those kind of people are likely to do.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-c83b960a-8bd0-4bc2-1f0a-b61f2c3bdb45">Judging by the size and enthusiasm of the crowd here, that shouldn't be a problem, since Donald Trump is headed for a landslide of historic proportions. But thoughtful as ever, Trump contemplated the remote possibility that he might actually lose. "Oh you better elect me folks, I'll never speak to you again," he </span><a href="http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016-election/his-words-19-notable-thoughts-donald-trump-n630446">said</a>. "Can you imagine—can you imagine how badly I'll feel if I spend all of that money, all of this energy, all of this time, and lost? I will never, ever forgive the people of Connecticut, I will never forgive the people of Florida and Pennsylvania and Ohio. But I love them anyway, we'll see. I think we're gonna do very well."</p>
<p><em><span id="docs-internal-guid-c83b960a-8bd0-4bc2-1f0a-b61f2c3bdb45">*Note: all Trump quotes in this article are real. Seriously.</span></em></p>
</div></div></div>Mon, 15 Aug 2016 09:00:51 +0000225671 at http://prospect.orgPaul WaldmanWould Liberals Support a Donald Trump of the Left? In the End, They Probably Wouldhttp://prospect.org/article/would-liberals-support-donald-trump-left-end-they-probably-would
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<p>Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks during a campaign rally, Friday, August 5, 2016, in Green Bay, Wisconsin. </p>
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<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-10cda48e-6743-8672-ffba-731f8cc2120e"><span class="dropcap">W</span>e all like to think of ourselves as principled, thoughtful, and courageous. So ask yourself this: If the Democrats nominated their own version of Donald Trump, what would you do?</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-10cda48e-6743-8672-ffba-731f8cc2120e">When we're not horrified by the Republican nominee for president, those of us on the left have been soaking in <em>schadenfreude </em>this year, watching the Republican Party reap what they've spent the last eight years (and more, depending on how you look at it) sowing. All the race-baiting, all the immigrant-bashing, all the establishment-vilifying, all the government-delegitimizing has come to its logical fruition in Trump's nomination. So over on this side we say they deserve every bit of what Trump has reduced them to—and we pay respect to the few with the guts to stand up and say that they will not be party to this abomination of a candidacy.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-10cda48e-6743-8672-ffba-731f8cc2120e">The greatest scorn is reserved for those like Paul Ryan or John McCain, who make sure we understand their disagreements with Trump and their dismay at the fact that he leads their party, but who nonetheless endorse his candidacy. I'd never do that, it's tempting to say. But is it true? </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-10cda48e-6743-8672-ffba-731f8cc2120e">What if the Democratic Party had nominated someone whose career was full of scams, who could barely open his mouth without lying, who displayed an ignorance of policy and public affairs that would shame a seventh grader, and whose campaign was built on hatred and demagoguery? And let's say he was running against someone liberals truly reviled, like Ted Cruz. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-10cda48e-6743-8672-ffba-731f8cc2120e">The reasons to support your liberal Trump would be powerful. You'd know that even if this embarrassment won, the same policy experts who would populate any Democratic administration would have to fill out the 3,000 or so political appointments in the executive branch, because there'd be no one else to do it—and personnel, as they say, is policy. The liberal version of Trump would make perfectly acceptable appointments to the Supreme Court (and other federal courts as well), because it was one of many substantive matters he obviously cared nothing about. He'd simply outsource it to the Democrats around him who do care. And since a Trump victory would almost certainly come with a Republican Congress, imagine there would be a Democratic Congress delivering our liberal Trump a steady stream of progressive bills to sign, which he would do willingly—again, because he just didn't care enough about legislation not to.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-10cda48e-6743-8672-ffba-731f8cc2120e">Now imagine that all this was happening at the end of eight years of Republican rule, when there was so much built-up frustration and so much work that needed to be done. How would you feel then?</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-10cda48e-6743-8672-ffba-731f8cc2120e">I've seen liberals discuss this issue in public and in private, and to serve the thought experiment they usually throw up some names of left-wing celebrities whose nomination for president would be disturbing for one reason or another, like Sean Penn or Kanye West. But the analogy never quite fits, because Trump is so unique, and uniquely loathsome. Even so, it might sound like a cop-out to say that Democrats would never nominate like Penn or West for president, but it's also almost certainly true.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-10cda48e-6743-8672-ffba-731f8cc2120e">For starters, it was the civil war within the GOP that created the opening for Trump's candidacy, and nothing similar can be seen on the Democratic side—though of course it might one day. Nevertheless, there are features of the Democratic Party and liberalism itself that make it all but impossible.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-10cda48e-6743-8672-ffba-731f8cc2120e"><span class="pullquote-right">The Democrats haven't poured contempt on the ideas of expertise and political experience the way Republicans have—which makes considering someone like Trump possible.</span> The base of the Republican Party is consumed by the kind of anger that can lead to people saying, "Screw it, let's vote for Trump." On the other hand, the core constituency of the Democrats, African Americans—without whose support no Democrat can win the presidential nomination—has long demonstrated an extreme practicality in where they put their votes (perhaps because once you've had to fight so hard to acquire and keep the right to vote, you're less inclined toward using it to make symbolic statements). And liberals fundamentally believe in government, so they're not going to hire an arsonist to burn it down on the off-chance that what emerges from the ashes might be an improvement over the status quo.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-10cda48e-6743-8672-ffba-731f8cc2120e">What about the Sanders campaign? Doesn't that show that an outsider—even if he isn't a vile demagogue—could seize the party with a radical program thin on practicalities? You might argue that </span><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/02/11/sanders-says-single-payer-health-care-can-happen-in-his-first-term-if-people-demand-it/">saying</a> that Republicans in Congress will vote for single-payer health care because you'll have a revolution and people will demand it isn't much more grounded in reality than "<a href="https://youtu.be/nMQD6FGGBzw">We will have so much winning if I get elected that you may get bored with winning</a>." But the truth is that the real problem with Trump isn't a lack of fleshed-out policy plans. Bernie Sanders fed his unlikely campaign on idealism and hope, even if his analysis of the system and his proposed solutions were sometimes overly simplistic. Trump, on the other hand, feeds his campaign on hatred and fear.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-10cda48e-6743-8672-ffba-731f8cc2120e">So yes, you could find a left-wing celebrity who has some wacky ideas, or who knows less than he thinks he does, or even who is simultaneously repellent and charismatic. But are there any who could reach down into the American psyche and find a throbbing tumor of hate to massage the way Trump has? Who would celebrate our worst impulses, turn us against each other, and promise to enshrine people's ugliest prejudices as national policy? And who upon doing that would be greeted with cheers from a plurality of Democratic primary voters?</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-10cda48e-6743-8672-ffba-731f8cc2120e">No, you couldn't. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-10cda48e-6743-8672-ffba-731f8cc2120e">You may be saying: OK, but just for the sake of argument, what if Democrats </span><em>did </em>nominate someone like Trump? What if they were in exactly the same position Republicans are now? What then?</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-10cda48e-6743-8672-ffba-731f8cc2120e">I think we'd see the same thing. Some liberals would speak out against the nominee, either because they had determined it was their best strategy for the future (as Ted Cruz has), or because their position gives them the freedom to do so without risk (as is true of anti-Trump conservative pundits like George Will or Bill Kristol). But most would weigh the pros and cons, then reluctantly get on board with the nominee.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-10cda48e-6743-8672-ffba-731f8cc2120e">Think about what Republicans are faced with now. If Hillary Clinton is elected, it would mean a large number of consequential and clearly understood losses for them. The Supreme Court will have a liberal majority, perhaps for decades to come. The Affordable Care Act will become further entrenched. The Obama administration's regulatory steps to address climate change will be safe, and will likely be expanded upon. You could list a hundred more consequences—and add to them all that Republicans would gain even with Donald Trump in the White House.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-10cda48e-6743-8672-ffba-731f8cc2120e">On the negative side of the scale, you have a lot of uncertainty. Will Trump's ignorance of policy and government do harm? Maybe, but maybe not. Will his comically thin skin lead to international crises? Maybe, but maybe not. Could he be dissuaded from following through on his most appalling ideas, like banning Muslims from entering the country? Maybe he could—he does have a legendarily short attention span. Will his white nationalist campaign taint the party over the long term? Probably—but once he's the nominee, it may be too late.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-10cda48e-6743-8672-ffba-731f8cc2120e">So the way most Republicans have decided to resolve their dilemma is to criticize him for the more vile things he says and does, while still maintaining their support for him. It may not be the most principled of stands, but it's enough to let them sleep at night. And if Democrats ever found themselves in the same position, it's probably what most of them would do, too. </span></p>
<p><span id="docs-internal-guid-10cda48e-6743-8672-ffba-731f8cc2120e">Fortunately, they'll almost certainly never have to face that choice.</span></p>
</div></div></div>Mon, 08 Aug 2016 09:00:00 +0000225633 at http://prospect.orgPaul WaldmanDonald Trump's Fight With the Parents of a Fallen Soldier Is Just What His Supporters Wanthttp://prospect.org/article/donald-trumps-fight-parents-fallen-soldier-just-what-his-supporters-want
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<p>Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump arrives for a campaign rally, Wednesday, July 27, 2016, in Toledo, Ohio. </p>
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<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-10cda48e-438a-6ad6-8e88-75953fea0076"><span class="dropcap">D</span>onald Trump is no professional politician, that's for sure. Because if he were, he'd understand that even if you're incapable of anything resembling human empathy, at least you have to fake it. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-10cda48e-438a-6ad6-8e88-75953fea0076">Perhaps I'm being unfair. Perhaps he really does care for the welfare of others, and it's just a little hard for those of us without access to his private thoughts to tell. But Trump's squabble with the parents of a soldier who was killed in Iraq will certainly live on as one of the strangest and most memorable episodes in an already bizarre campaign.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-10cda48e-438a-6ad6-8e88-75953fea0076">You've no doubt already </span><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/07/31/khizr-khan-calls-trump-a-black-soul-says-mcconnell-ryan-have-moral-obligation-to-repudiate-him/">heard</a> about the parents of Captain Humayun Khan, who was killed in Iraq; they appeared at the Democratic convention to criticize Trump for the things he has said about Muslims and immigrants like themselves and their son. Had Trump been an ordinary politician—or an ordinary person—he would have said the same thing in response that any of us would: something like, "Of course it's terrible that they lost their son, and I'm sorry they disagree with me. But here's why I take the position I do." Instead, Trump attacked them, implying that Ghazala Khan let her husband do the talking because as a Muslim woman she was forbidden to speak (<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/ghazala-khan-donald-trump-criticized-my-silence-he-knows-nothing-about-true-sacrifice/2016/07/31/c46e52ec-571c-11e6-831d-0324760ca856_story.html">not true</a>) and saying that Khizr Khan "had no right to stand in front of millions of people and claim I have never read the Constitution."</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-10cda48e-438a-6ad6-8e88-75953fea0076">The irony of that assertion was no doubt lost on him, but had Trump responded to the Khans with a little more humanity, the story surely wouldn't be on front pages all across America, the Khans wouldn't be on </span><em><a href="http://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/meet-press-july-31-2016-n620491">Meet the Press</a></em> and writing <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/ghazala-khan-donald-trump-criticized-my-silence-he-knows-nothing-about-true-sacrifice/2016/07/31/c46e52ec-571c-11e6-831d-0324760ca856_story.html">op-eds</a> for <em>The Washington Post</em>. But he responded the way he did because that's who he is.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-10cda48e-438a-6ad6-8e88-75953fea0076">There are things everyone familiar with Trump understood before this campaign began—that he's uncommonly vulgar, that he's desperate for media attention, that he's either a bigot himself or sees stoking bigotry as a path to political renown (his birther crusade made that obvious). But there are other things that the campaign itself has revealed, including his absolute inability to let any slight go.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-10cda48e-438a-6ad6-8e88-75953fea0076">As Trump </span><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Think-BIG-Kick-Business-Life/dp/0061548189">wrote</a> in one of his books, "When someone crosses you, my advice is 'Get Even!' That is not typical advice, but it is real life advice. If you do not get even, you are just a schmuck! When people wrong you, go after those people because it is a good feeling and because other people will see you doing it. I love getting even." I've quoted this passage before, because I think that unlike most of the drivel in Trump's books, it contains an important truth about him. It shows that his impulse to counter every criticism with an attack is nothing new for him. And it's looking less like a strategy and more like a deep-seated <em>need</em>, something Trump couldn't stop himself from doing if he tried.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-10cda48e-438a-6ad6-8e88-75953fea0076">I'm not going to try to determine where in Trump's development this need arose, but it's far too obvious to deny. It has a flip side as well: <span class="pullquote-right">Just as anyone who has criticized him must be attacked, anyone who has praised him must be a terrific, top-notch person, really grade A, believe me.</span> Just look at how Trump responds when people question his admiration for Vladimir Putin. Again and again, he justifies it by saying that Putin "called me a genius," (even though </span><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2016/05/03/no-putin-did-not-call-donald-trump-a-genius/">he didn't</a>), as though that settles the question of Putin's virtue. OK, so he's a dictator, presiding over a kleptocracy, who has journalists murdered. But how could he be bad if he thinks highly of me? If Jeffrey Dahmer had said he enjoyed <em>The Apprentice</em>, Trump would call him misunderstood.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-10cda48e-438a-6ad6-8e88-75953fea0076">Trump's fight with the Khans has gotten him condemnation not just from liberals, but from </span><a href="http://www.politico.com/story/2016/07/khan-mconnell-trump-226485">Republicans</a> as well (though they're still supporting his candidacy). But it would be a mistake to think this will hurt Trump among his most ardent supporters—in fact, to them this controversy won't look that different from the many others that Trump has left in his wake.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-10cda48e-438a-6ad6-8e88-75953fea0076">You or I might find Trump's need to lash out at anybody who isn't nice to him to be pathological, but to many of his voters it's one of the things they like about him. Going after a Gold Star Mother, or saying a judge can't be impartial if he has Mexican heritage, is just one more way to not be "politically correct." Just as Trump has spent decades enacting a comically garish version of what wealth is supposed to look like, he now enacts a version of existence in which he gets back at anyone and everyone, without the faintest regard for social and political norms or even common decency.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-10cda48e-438a-6ad6-8e88-75953fea0076">You can see how there would be something almost intoxicating about that for a certain kind of white man. He keeps hearing about "privilege" but he doesn't feel privileged. His hometown is becoming diverse in a way he's not too pleased with—but he's not supposed to say it's a bad thing. His job isn't great and his boss is kind of a jerk—but the last thing he's allowed to do is act like Donald Trump and tell the boss where to shove it. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-10cda48e-438a-6ad6-8e88-75953fea0076">So to him, Trump looks like the one liberated man, who can say anything, insult anyone, and get away with it. Trump is the only one who "tells it like it is." The more offensive Trump is, the more it reinforces that voter's belief that he's the only one willing to speak the truth. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-10cda48e-438a-6ad6-8e88-75953fea0076">And now, Trump is making that voter feel like he can do a little bit of that in his own life (even if he still can't tell off his boss). If you talk to people from various parts of the country, you may have heard this kind of report: Something different is in the air in places where there are lots of conservative whites. People are <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/cover_story/2016/07/sexual_assault_case_involving_refugees_in_idaho_in_the_age_of_donald_trump.html">expressing</a> anger and contempt in language they've been afraid to use in recent years—at African Americans, at Latinos, at Muslims, at immigrants. And they're doing it almost gleefully, with the electric thrill you get from violating a taboo. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-10cda48e-438a-6ad6-8e88-75953fea0076">At the moment those reports are anecdotal—it's a difficult thing to quantify in a survey. But Trump is giving people something very important: permission. Permission to let some powerful feelings see the light of day, without worrying about whether some liberal will call you a racist because of what you said. "Donald Trump is freeing people," </span><a href="http://www.tbs.com/videos/full-frontal-with-samantha-bee/season-1/episode-20/republican-national-convention.html">says</a> Samantha Bee, "from the cruel shackles of empathy and mutual respect."</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-10cda48e-438a-6ad6-8e88-75953fea0076">How did he do it, when people like Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly have been saying the same things for years, both about minorities and about "political correctness"? Maybe it's because Trump's platform is bigger and wider than even they ever had. No matter how many millions Limbaugh or O'Reilly speak to, their audiences know it's a semi-private conversation, one meant mostly for those who are already in agreement with each other. Trump, on the other hand, is on the front page of every newspaper every day and the lead story of the TV news every night. He's right there speaking to the whole country, saying what they've only been thinking. And no matter how much he's criticized for it, he's managed to win until now, first by beating his primary opponents and then by making almost the whole Republican Party line up behind him, no matter how much they hate themselves for it.</span></p>
<p><span id="docs-internal-guid-10cda48e-438a-6ad6-8e88-75953fea0076">Trump's fight with Humayun Khan's parents is, like the man himself, crass and thoughtless and either indifferent to giving offense or purposely designed to offend. The rest of us may see it as both an outrage against decency and a political mistake. But it's one of the Trumpiest things Trump has done. </span></p>
</div></div></div>Mon, 01 Aug 2016 09:00:00 +0000225596 at http://prospect.orgPaul WaldmanWhy Tim Kaine Is the Progressives' Dreamhttp://prospect.org/article/why-tim-kaine-progressives-dream
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<p>Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine appear for the frst time together on the stage in Miami, Florida, on July 23, 2016.</p>
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<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-9add712e-1ef8-e77d-4048-09cd5cad2038"><span class="dropcap">T</span>he vice presidency tends to be vastly overrated during the presidential campaign and then underrated once the administration takes office. So it has been since Hillary Clinton announced Friday that Virginia Senator Tim Kaine would be her running mate. Progressives rushed to tell reporters how disappointed they were that one of their preferred choices like Elizabeth Warren or Sherrod Brown wasn't the one picked, expressing how deeply troubled they were about the rightward pull Kaine would supposedly have on Clinton's prospective presidency. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-9add712e-1ef8-e77d-4048-09cd5cad2038">But they shouldn't be worried; in fact, Kaine is likely to be a genuine boon to progressive goals. That might sound odd if you've been listening to some of the Bernie Sanders dead-enders (a group that, it should be noted, does not include Bernie Sanders himself) over the last couple of days. But hear me out.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-9add712e-1ef8-e77d-4048-09cd5cad2038">To begin, here's what I wrote in a </span><a href="http://prospect.org/article/real-stakes-veepstakes-0">long piece</a> for the <em>Prospect</em> print magazine a few months ago on the subject of the vice presidential choice:</p>
<blockquote><p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-9add712e-1ef8-e77d-4048-09cd5cad2038">So ideally, Clinton (or any other party nominee) would pick a running mate who 1) is ready to become president if the need arises; 2) knows the federal government well enough to navigate its complexity to accomplish difficult tasks; 3) has the political skills that are required both internally and externally, so as to act as an effective spokesperson for the administration; 4) is smart and thoughtful enough to give good advice; and 5) has a strong personal relationship with the president.</span></p>
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<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-9add712e-1ef8-e77d-4048-09cd5cad2038">While we don't yet know what Clinton and Kaine's relationship will be like, there's little doubt that Kaine meets the first four criteria. And you'll notice what isn't on there: the idea that the running mate should help the candidate win. That's because running mates almost never have a significant effect on the election's outcome, and in the rare cases when they do, it's because they cost the nominee votes (see Palin, Sarah). In this year of two strong personalities at the top of the tickets, it's even less likely that the running mate will make much of a difference.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-9add712e-1ef8-e77d-4048-09cd5cad2038">Which means that the important question with regard to Kaine is what kind of vice president he'd be. But it seems that most people think about the running mate in the same terms they used to think about their primary choice, including, "Does this person agree with me on every issue?" Even if that were your standard (which it shouldn't be), some on the left are making way too much of Kaine's few deviations from progressive orthodoxy.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-9add712e-1ef8-e77d-4048-09cd5cad2038">For instance, Kaine is a devout Catholic who believes in the Church's teaching on abortion, but who takes the same position that many prominent Catholic Democrats like Mario Cuomo and Joe Biden have in the past: that he opposes abortion as a personal matter, but does not believe he has the right to impose that belief on others, so he supports abortion rights as a matter of public policy. Even though he has perfect 100 percent </span><a href="https://votesmart.org/candidate/evaluations/50772/tim-kaine#.V5OBh_krKUm">ratings</a> from Planned Parenthood and NARAL, some are still skeptical about his commitment to a woman's right to choose (Katha Pollitt makes the most persuasive case <a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/tim-kaine-has-a-mixed-record-on-abortion-how-much-will-that-matter/">here</a>). But is the vice president going to be setting policy on abortion in the Clinton administration? Of course not. In fact, there may be no priority progressives have to worry about less than that one if Hillary Clinton becomes president.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-9add712e-1ef8-e77d-4048-09cd5cad2038">You can say something similar about the fact that Kaine </span><a href="http://www.politico.com/story/2016/07/tim-kaine-banking-letter-225953">signed a letter</a> urging the administration not to impose the same kinds of capital requirements on region banks (like Capital One, headquartered in Virginia), as they do on the largest banks. You can take issue with it, but it's not as though Kaine is being nominated for Treasury secretary; we have no idea how much influence he'll have over banking policy, but it wouldn't be a surprise if it's approximately zero.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-9add712e-1ef8-e77d-4048-09cd5cad2038">Those disagreements also shouldn't blind you to the fact that Kaine has an extremely progressive record overall. He was one of the first Virginia Democrats to turn his back on the way members of his party had traditionally campaigned in the state (bending over backwards to show conservative white voters that they were good ol' boys); instead, Kaine won races for lieutenant governor, governor, and senator by putting together earlier versions of the Obama coalition, based on African Americans, immigrant groups, and white liberals. He has an unquestioned lifelong commitment to civil rights, and he ran as an opponent of the death penalty and an advocate of gun control, which took no small measure of courage in the capital of the Confederacy. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-9add712e-1ef8-e77d-4048-09cd5cad2038"><span class="pullquote-right">While Kaine may not have an explosive charisma, he's a deft campaigner with a friendly mien who exudes compassion and caring.</span> I look forward to him telling Americans in a debate how his deep faith leads him to inclusive, progressive ideas, a stark contrast with Mike Pence, who always seems to be about to tell you how dancing leads to sinful thoughts. Kaine is also extremely serious about governing, which I suspect is a big part of what finally convinced Hillary Clinton to choose him.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-9add712e-1ef8-e77d-4048-09cd5cad2038">To be clear, we don't yet know what kind of vision Clinton has for the vice presidency, or how adept Kaine will be at navigating the bureaucracy and working with Congress to help pass the bills the administration is pushing and see them implemented effectively. But he seems to have that combination of skill in the public aspect of the job and experience in the private aspect that can lead to a successful vice presidency. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-9add712e-1ef8-e77d-4048-09cd5cad2038">And helping Clinton govern effectively is the best way he can advance progressivism. Let's be clear about this: An extremely progressive vice president who doesn't accomplish much in the job will do far less for progressive goals than a highly effective vice president helping the president implement her agenda. Even if Clinton is too conservative for your taste, on the issues you care about what you should want more than anything is for her to succeed. Among other things, she wants to increase the minimum wage, achieve universal child care, enact new workplace protections, expand Social Security, entrench and improve the Affordable Care Act, make college more affordable, expand infrastructure spending, enact universal background checks for gun purchases, and build on the measures to combat climate change the Obama administration has undertaken. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-9add712e-1ef8-e77d-4048-09cd5cad2038">On any one of those issues (or all of them) you might take a position to the left of hers. But none of them will be easy to accomplish, and if you're a progressive, the worst thing would be for her to fail—then you get nothing, and the chance of a Republican becoming president in four years would be even higher. And while you might imagine that it would be better to have a liberal firebrand pulling Clinton to the left from the inside, in practice that would probably mean nothing more than a VP who ends up marginalized. A vice president without the president's trust and support is someone who winds up doing nothing but going to funerals. </span></p>
<p><span id="docs-internal-guid-9add712e-1ef8-e77d-4048-09cd5cad2038">So when you hear progressive groups criticizing the choice of Tim Kaine, keep in mind: That's their job. They may praise a particular development or decision, but for the most part, they exist to complain about things in order to exert pressure in their preferred direction. No interest group on the left, right, or center issues press releases headlined, "Everything going fine, no need to be concerned." But even if they (or you) wanted someone else in the job, Tim Kaine could well turn out to be the best choice not just for Clinton, but for the entire left.</span></p>
</div></div></div>Mon, 25 Jul 2016 09:00:00 +0000225530 at http://prospect.orgPaul WaldmanTrumpapalooza Should Be One Hot Mess of a Conventionhttp://prospect.org/article/trumpapalooza-should-be-one-hot-mess-convention
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<p>Donald Trump with Ivanka Trump announces Mike Pence as his VP pick, July 16, 2016. </p>
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<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-9add712e-fbbc-56fc-c598-ad599fece3be"><span class="dropcap">I</span>n most election years, you can count on at least a few pundits to lament that all the time, effort, and expense of the party conventions is for little purpose other than airing a four-night-long advertisement for the nominee, an endless recitation of already-tired talking points issued to drunken delegates while journalists prowl the hall in a fruitless effort to find some interesting news to report. But not this year! The Democratic convention in Philadelphia may turn out that way, but the Republican gathering in Cleveland promises to be as much of an angry, chaotic mess as the campaign of the man the delegates will raise up. It should be great fun, provided no one actually gets killed. Which isn't out of the realm of possibility. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-9add712e-fbbc-56fc-c598-ad599fece3be">Republicans will insist that it's all going according to plan, and any other impression you might have could only be the fault of a biased media eagerly seeking out any signs of discontent and division in Cleveland. In a small way, they'll be right the assembled media will indeed highlight all the unrest they can find. What Republicans are wrong about is their belief that this will happen because of liberal media bias. The truth is that discontent and division contain the essential foundation of any good story: conflict. The typical convention is desperately short on conflict, as people in funny hats cheer for a nominee everyone agrees is a super guy. But if you've got people fighting each other, you have a much more interesting story.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-9add712e-fbbc-56fc-c598-ad599fece3be">The other problem with the Republican complaint is that the party really is divided. We still don't know how many Republican voters will defect come November, but at the elite level—and the convention is when a bunch of elites get together, even if most of them claim to be anything but—there's enough dissatisfaction to feed four days of coverage. As John Ward </span><a href="https://www.yahoo.com/news/cleveland-dazed-gop-marches-toward-000000623.html">wrote</a> on Saturday, "A few thousand members of the Republican Party will gather over the next few days for an event ostensibly devoted to celebrating a man whom large numbers of them don't like and didn't support for most of the primary process."</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-9add712e-fbbc-56fc-c598-ad599fece3be">Which is why so many Republican officeholders are refusing to show up at the convention. None of the party's rising minority stars—like Nikki Haley, Brian Sandoval, Tim Scott, and Susana Martinez—will be speaking at the convention. They'll have plenty of company from other Republican officeholders and candidates who found urgent appointments elsewhere this week. The Republican governor of the state where it's being held isn't even going to show. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-9add712e-fbbc-56fc-c598-ad599fece3be">Meanwhile, <em>Politico</em> </span><a href="http://www.politico.com/playbook#ixzz4EhA0vinl">reported</a> on Sunday that "Speaker Paul Ryan is spending nearly $150,000 next week to run his own political advertising during the week of the Republican convention." While we don't know what the ads will say, I'm pretty sure they won't be stirring tributes to his party's nominee. Instead, they're likely to be aimed at reinforcing Ryan's image as the substantive policy guy of the GOP—in other words, exactly what Trump isn't. The implied message is, "OK, so our nominee is a spectacular jackass, but don't give up on the Republican Party. Ryan 2020!" And he's the official chair of the convention.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-9add712e-fbbc-56fc-c598-ad599fece3be">That's not to mention whatever brand of chaos erupts outside, where protesters from the left and right are descending on the site. Fortunately, there will be plenty of guns around, since Ohio has an open-carry law allowing you to sling your AR-15 over your shoulder and head down to the convention center. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-9add712e-fbbc-56fc-c598-ad599fece3be"><span class="pullquote">But don't expect much excitement from the convention stage, unless it comes in the form of pratfalls or an unannounced cameo by Clint Eastwood's chair. </span>The campaign finally released its list of featured speakers on Sunday evening, and it isn't exactly an all-star lineup. First, each night will feature a speech by another Trump—one wife and four kids, including the heretofore invisible Tiffany, fathered during The Donald's brief marriage to Marla Maples. While the little Trumps obviously admire their dad, something tells me America isn't going to warm to Trump because they see his children, who look like they just stepped out of </span><a href="http://richkidsofinstagram.tumblr.com/">Rich Kids of Instagram</a>, explaining what a great guy he is.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-9add712e-fbbc-56fc-c598-ad599fece3be">The rest of the program is made up mostly of people who will send you to Google after you ask, "Who?" There's an actress who appears on </span><em>The Young and the Restless</em>. There's the woman who runs the Trump Winery and someone who works at the Eric Trump Foundation, who I'm sure was in no way given a primetime speaking slot because she's one of the few black people in America with something nice to say about Donald Trump (and I'm also sure that Trump's aides have reiterated to him that under no circumstances should he say about her, "<a href="http://www.cnn.com/2016/06/03/politics/donald-trump-african-american/">Look at my African-American over there</a>"). There's controversial libertarian tech douche Peter Thiel, and private equity magnate Tom Barrack (get ready for a hilarious joke about his last name!), no doubt there to testify about the business acumen of the man responsible for such American success stories as Trump University and Trump Steaks. And there's Newt Gingrich.</p>
<p><span id="docs-internal-guid-9add712e-fbbc-56fc-c598-ad599fece3be">In other words, the GOP is not exactly putting its best foot forward with this convention, at least if its intention is to convince a majority of the American electorate to hand the White House and the executive branch to Donald Trump and the people willing to work for him. But it should be quite a show.</span></p>
</div></div></div>Mon, 18 Jul 2016 09:00:00 +0000225440 at http://prospect.orgPaul Waldman